Pathologies of hyperfamiliarity in dreams, delusions and déjà vu

Abstract

The ability to challenge and revise thoughts prompted by anomalous experiences depends on activity in right dorsolateral prefrontal circuitry. When activity in those circuits is absent or compromised subjects are less likely to make this kind of correction. This appears to be the cause of some delusions of misidentification consequent on experiences of hyperfamiliarity for faces. Comparing the way the mind responds to the experience of hyperfamiliarity in different conditions such as delusions, dreams, pathological and non-pathological déjà vu, provides a way to understand claims that delusions and dreams are both states characterized by deficient “reality testing.”

Free Energy and Virtual Reality in Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis: A Complexity Theory of Dreaming and Mental Disorder

“…In order to illustrate this, let us briefly sketch some applications in schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder. A first idea would be that schizophrenic and manic hallucinations and delusions are produced to perform the complexity-reducing function of dreams, but in waking (cf Llewellyn, 2011 ; Gerrans, 2014 ; Skrzypinska and Szmigielska, 2015 ). As an example we can consider the delusions developed by Elyn Saks, whose experience of schizophrenic disorganization was described above.…”

Hypersynchronic Mental Automatisms: An Innovative Psychiatric Hypothesis Reaffirming Its Validity for Fifteen Years

“…Thus, the subject experiences it as something alien to his own mind and/or will and, so, coming from other different mind. This interpretation of déjà vu as a telepathic phenomenon is more evident when this paramnesia is accompanied by the extrasensory perception of events occurring at a distance, a fact that occurs with relative frequency [44]. Something similar can be said of the autoscopy, an experience in which the individual has the impression that the mind is leaving the body and, so, he/she is able to see it from the outside.…”

The Hypothesis of <i>Hyperia</i> from the Perspective of Neuronal Plasticity

“…Thus, the subject experiences it as something alien to his own mind and/or coming from other different mind. This interpretation of déjà vu as a telepathic phenomenon is more evident when this paramnesia is accompanied by cognition of events taking place at a distance, a fact that occurs with relative frequency [21].…”