Can you imagine living every new situation like you’ve lived it before?That’s what happens in Louis syndrome. Read on to learn more.
Summer, are you on the beach with your family, are you commenting on a recent event during a card game and all of a sudden?”I’ve been through this before. Almost everyone will know it’s called deja vu, but could you imagine what it would be like to live constantly with that feeling?This is what happened to Louis, whose case was called Louis syndrome.
- Before we go deeper into Louis’s case.
- We must stop to explain what déj vu is and where the name comes from.
- How and why it happens and whether it is pathological or not.
The term déjà vu (“already seen” in French) is used to refer to a paramnesia or recognition anomaly in which one feels that something has been seen before when in fact, we know that it is the first time. that you feel a certain familiarity with situations, facts or facts that, in fact, are new. Also, it is common to have feelings of “strangeness”.
The term was first used in 1876 by the French philosopher Emile Boirac. Boirac wrote to the Philosophical Review of France and the Stranger in response to a reader who claimed to remember the facts as if they were from a previous life. Boirac replied that he had also had the same experience: J?I’ve seen what I see (I’ve seen what I see).
Psychologist Edward B. Titchener explains that the cause of déjo vu is a brief look at an object or situation before the brain ends: a conscious perception of experience. It would be like a kind of “partial perception” that manifests itself as a false sense of familiarity.
However, it was not until 1896, thanks to the French psychiatrist Francois-Léon Arnaud, who coined the term already seen, who presented the case of patient Louis to the Medical-Psychological Society.
Louis was a 34-year-old army officer who was released from service after serving in Vietnam because he had begun to develop strange symptoms: he took the present by the past and had the constant feeling of experiencing replicas exactly what he had experienced in the past. years, or months before.
Louis was admitted to Vanves Health Home, where Dr. Francois-Léon Arnaud worked, no wonder that when he arrived at the site of the events, he claimed to recognize everything he saw for the first time, not just that. He also said he felt what he felt: the last time he was there. This phenomenon is known as it has already felt (it has already felt). Even when he met the doctor, Louis thought he was pretending not to know him because he could recognize him perfectly. .
Arnaud says that despite evidence showing Louis that it was the first time he was there, he firmly stated that he lived “two parallel lives” in which everything was repeated.
“I recognize you, Doctor. You were the one who greeted me a year ago, at the same time and in the same room. He asked me the same questions as now and I’ve given him the same answers. stop now?-Louis-
Deja vu is a normal experience: about two-thirds of the population has already experienced it, however, chronic déj vu is not normal and is usually associated with neurological injuries, in fact, Louis’ symptoms seem to be due to some kind of disease. contracted in Vietnam, which affected his nervous system.
Arnaud brings us together in a simple but effective way, to differentiate when a deja vu is normal and when it is pathological: déj vu in healthy people is lived as something rare and transient, with the awareness that that feeling of having seen or lived the situation is just an illusion. Deja vu is considered pathological when there is a belief that everything has happened before.
Therefore, when analyzing the case of Louis syndrome today, perhaps the most appropriate diagnosis was not déj vu, since this term, as we have seen, refers to a relatively normal experience, perhaps its symptoms were more a kind of reduplicative paramnesia. or a collective conspiracy. It is a collection of manufactured memories that are used to fill memory voids caused by amnesia.
Both types of phenomena, both collective conspiracy and déj vu, could be located in different areas of the brain: it appears that déja vu was in the medial temporal lobe and collective conspiracy in the frontal lobe; however, other studies have found déj vu in the insula, an area of the brain linked to sensitivity and emotions.
To prove this, more neuroimaging studies are needed, and it is necessary to be able to reproduce déjà vu in the laboratory. It sounds complicated, yes, but at the rate at which science progresses, the final answer may be much closer than expected.