Louis Syndrome: Living In Permanent Déjà Vu

Summer. You are on the beach with your family, commenting on a recent event while playing a game of cards and, suddenly… ” I have already experienced this . ” Most of you will know that this is déjà vu , but are any of you capable of imagining what it would be like to live with this feeling constantly? This is what happened to Louis, whose case gave its name to Louis syndrome.

Before getting into the case of Louis, we have to stop to explain what déjà vu is and where this name comes from , how and why it occurs and whether or not it is pathological.

Before Louis syndrome… What is déjà vu?

The term déjà vu (‘already seen’, in French) is a term that is used to refer to a paramnesia or recognition anomaly in which it is experienced that something had already been seen before when we really know that it is the first time that it we see. The result is that you experience a certain sense of familiarity with situations, events or events that are actually new. In addition to this, it is common to have feelings of “strangeness” or “strangeness.”

This term was used for the first time, in 1876, by the French philosopher Émile Boirac. Boirac wrote to the magazine Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger to respond to a reader of the magazine who claimed to remember events as if they were from a previous life. Boirac replied that he had also had the same experience: J’ai déjà vu ce que je vois (I have already seen what I am seeing).

On the other hand, the psychologist Edward B. Titchener, explains that the cause of déjà vu is a brief vision of an object or situation, before the brain has finished “building” a conscious perception of the experience. It would be like a type 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, that the term déjà vu was coined . Arnaud presented the case of the patient Louis to the Medico-Psychological Society.

Stepping into Louis syndrome

Louis was a 34-year-old army officer who had been discharged from service after serving in Vietnam because he had begun to develop strange symptoms: he confused the present with the past and had the constant feeling of living exact replicas of what he had already lived. the previous years or months.

Louis entered the Vanves Medical Home, where Dr. Francois-Léon Arnaud worked. It was no surprise that when he arrived at the place, he claimed to recognize everything he was seeing for the first time. And not only that. He also said he felt what he felt ” the previous time he was there .” This phenomenon is known as déjà senti  (already felt). Even when he met Dr. Louis, he believed that he was pretending not to know him because he could recognize him perfectly.

Arnaud says that, despite the evidence that showed Louis that it was the first time he had been there, he firmly maintained that he was living “two parallel lives” in which everything was repeated.

From non-pathological déjà vu to Louis syndrome

The déjà vu is a normal experience: approximately two thirds of the population have experienced déjà vu. However, the déjà vu chronic is not normal and is usually associated with neurological damage. In fact, Louis’s symptoms appeared to be due to some kind of disease contracted in Vietnam that affected his nervous system.

Arnaud brings us closer to a simple, but effective, to differentiate when a déjà vu is normal and when patologico: the déjà vu in healthy people is experienced as something rare and transient, with the awareness that feeling of having seen or lived before it is nothing more than an illusion. The déjà vu is considered pathological when the conviction that everything has happened before really exists.

Therefore, analyzing the case of Louis today, perhaps the most appropriate diagnosis was not that of déjá vu , since this term, as we have seen, refers to a relatively normal experience. Perhaps his symptoms were more of a type of reduplicative paramnesia or a collective conspiracy. This consists of a collection of fabricated memories that are used to fill memory gaps caused by amnesia.

An unclear phenomenon, but increasingly explained

Both types of phenomena, both the collective conspiracy and the déjà vu, have been able to be located in different brain areas: it seems that the déjà vu was located in the medial temporal lobe and the collective conspiracy in the frontal lobe. However, other studies have located déjà vu in the insula, an area of ​​the brain linked to sensitivity and emotions.

To demonstrate this, more neuroimaging studies are necessary and déjà vu must be able to be elicited in the laboratory. It sounds complicated, yes, but at the speed at which science advances, perhaps the definitive answer is much closer than expected. Until then, all the “I’ve already lived this” are associated only with happy moments.