July 25, 2017

Why Are People Worldwide Dreaming About This Man?

July 25, 2017/ Michael Chen

Have you ever dreamed about “This Man”? If you did, did he comfort or befriend you in your dreams? Or was he a malevolent entity that attempted to harm you in your nightmares? If you have dreamed of him, then you are one of thousands across that world who believe to have encountered “This Man” in their dreams at one point or several instances of their lives. This phenomenon became a viral Internet legend several years ago, and websites are also available online which are specially dedicated to describe people’s personal experiences of dreaming of “This Man.”

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Background on “This Man”

According to the “This Man” website allegedly set up by those who have dreamed about the strange man, every night throughout the world, hundreds of people dream about this man’s face. This dream-related phenomenon supposedly dates back in January 2006 in New York. As the story goes, the patient of a well-known psychiatrist drew the face of a man repeatedly appearing in her dreams. In more than one occasion, the man had provided her some advice concerning her private life, but the woman swears that she never met the man in real life.

The portrait of the man was set aside on the psychiatrist’s desk for a few days until one day another patient pointed out the portrait. He recognized the face in the drawing, saying that the man had often visited him in his dreams. Similar to the claims of the female patient of the psychiatrist, he claims that he has never seen the man in his waking life.

Finding it odd for two people to dream the same stranger, the psychiatrist decided to send the portrait of the man to some of his colleagues who had patients with recurrent dreams. Within just a few months, four patients turned up, claiming to recognize the man as a frequent presence in their own dreams. All the patients referred to the man appearing their dream as “This Man.”

Since the first reported appearance of “This Man” in people’s dreams in 2006, at least 2000 people have reportedly claimed to have all seen the same man in their dreams. The man has allegedly appeared in the dreams of many people in many cities all over the world, including Los Angeles, Berlin, Sao Paulo, Tehran, Beijing, Rome, Barcelona, Stockholm, Paris, New Delhi and Moscow.

According to the “This Man” website, there are currently no ascertained relation or common trait among the people that have dreamed of the strange man. What’s even stranger is that supposedly no real man in the waking world has ever been recognized as resembling the man drawn on the portrait by those who have seen him in their dreams.

Because of this mystery, it has become the ultimate objective of some people to find out the real identity of “This Man” and figure out the reason why he randomly appears in the dreams of a diverse set of human subjects in a variety of unrelated situations.

Theories Allegedly Explaining About “This Man”

The website dedicated to the “This Man” phenomenon has also enumerated and discussed several theories which have supposedly been developed to explain the mysteriously recurring presence of the man in the dreams of a wide variety of people who are not related with each other in any way. Some of these theories are said to have elicited great interest among those who have dreamed of the strange man, and these include the archetype theory, the religious theory, the dream surfer theory, the dream imitation theory and the daytime recognition theory.

Based on Carl Jung’s psychoanalytic theory, “This Man” is speculated to be an archetypal image belonging to humanity’s collective unconscious. This archetype appears in times of a person’s hardship, emotional development, dramatic changes in life and stressful circumstances. And because it is part of the collective unconscious of all people, it makes sense that the man shows up in the dreams of several individuals over the course of several years though they not-at-all related with each other.

There is also another theory about the phenomenon that is founded on religious beliefs. According to this theory, “This Man” is the image of the Creator himself, and that this particular form is one of the many faces in which God manifests himself before mortal beings. And because the appearance of this man is God’s way of revealing himself to people, it is also believed that whatever he utters during the dreams he appears in should be decidedly followed by the dreamers.

The “Dream Surfer” theory is probably the most interesting theory involving the appearance of the same man in the dreams of many people. But while it promises the greatest and most amazing implications, it is also a theory with the lowest scientific credibility. According to this theory, “This Man” is a real person who happens to have the ability to enter the dreams of other people using specific yet unknown psychological skills. There are those who supposedly believe that the man who appears in their dreams looks exactly the same in real life. However, others, on the other hand, think that the man in the dreams looks entirely different from his real-life counterpart. There are also speculations that the man is part of an elaborate mental conditioning plan developed by a powerful corporation.

There is also a scientific psycho-sociological theory which claims that the phenomenon arose casually but has since progressively spread among members of the public by imitation. This means that people who have read or heard about this phenomenon online or through other people who claims to have personally dreamt of the man have become so fascinated and involved with the phenomenon that they started seeing this man in their dreams as well.

Another theory states that apparitions of “This Man” in dreams of people are purely casual. Ordinarily, people do not recall the exact appearance and faces of people they see in their dreams. And so, the image of “This Man” is supposedly an instrument which facilitates the recognition of an undefined image that have appeared during people’s dream states.

“This Man” Is A Hoax

For years, the mysterious story about the same man visiting the dreams of people have spread across various online blogs, discussion forums and even social media communities, where lengthy conversations about the alleged phenomenon’s validity and debunking have ensued.

And so, this leads us to ask a one simple and very important question: Is there really a strange man appearing in the dreams of unrelated people? As it turns out, we never really needed a special theory to explain the “This Man” phenomenon after all, because the whole thing was just one big hoax.

The website – ThisMan.org – is actually the creation of Italian sociologist and marketing strategist Andrea Natella. It was also revealed that Natella runs a company called Guerrilla Marketing, which stages “subversive hoaxes” and creates weird art projects that are mostly about pornography, politics and advertising. The site was also briefly acquired by horror movie production company Ghost House Pictures as part of the promotion for a planned film titled “This Man,” which was supposed to be directed by Bryan Bertino based on a screenplay he also penned.

Regardless of the validity or falsity of this phenomenon, it cannot be ignored that the most-likely real reason “This Man” has gone viral as an internet story is that this fictional entity actually represents the image of “Every Man.” The Face of “This Man” is an amalgamation of many common facial features, which were probably added into the fake portrait showing the man’s face to rouse a sense of familiarity among the public. This myriad of common features may have been the reason why many people from all over the world thought “This Man” looked very familiar as if they had seen him before. And it is this familiarity in this fictional person’s face that has probably perpetuated the viral nature of “This Man.”

Although the “This Man” phenomenon turned out to be just one of many false stories and urban myths that are found online and have gone viral among members of the global internet community, the way that it has piqued the people’s interest and the extent of its impact as a sensationalized, fabricated internet legend cannot be easily dismissed. Neither are the rest of us allowed to be so quick in putting down and ridiculing those who still continue to insist that “This Man” actually exists and that he has actually appeared in people’s dreams. Who knows? Maybe we just don’t have enough evidence to prove that “This Man” is real after all.

Sources:

http://io9.gizmodo.com/5388286/why-are-thousands-of-people-dreaming-about-this-man
http://www.thisman.org/history.htm
http://www.thisman.org/theories.htm
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/have-you-ever-dreamed-of-this-man-111
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/this-man-ever-dream-this-man
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/we-got-hoaxed-about-that-this-man-dream-haunter-979
http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/ever-dream-this-man.html
http://www.andreanatella.it/
https://www.facebook.com/thisman.org

June 16, 2017

What is Deja Vu?

June 16, 2017/ Michael Chen

Did you ever get that odd and unsettling feeling or sense that you’ve been in an exact situation before? Or you’ve already experienced something that you know for certain you are doing for the very first time? Have you ever felt that overwhelming sense of familiarity with something that you shouldn’t be familiar with at all?

What is Déjà vu?

This phenomenon is called “déjà vu,” which in French literally means “already seen.” Essentially, it is a sensation that something we’re experiencing at the moment has happened before, whether it’s just a single element such as a taste, a sight or a sound, or whether it’s an entire sequence of events. Déjà vu is a common intuitive feeling that has happened to around 60 to 70 percent of people, and it occurs more frequently to people between 15 and 25 years old compared to any other age group.

Déjà vu is a rather complex phenomenon, and like many unusual phenomena involving the brain, it has yet to be fully understood. There is much speculation as to how and why this phenomenon occurs in people. To many parapsychologists, this occurs when things and experience from our past lives merge with our present life. Several psychoanalysts, on the other hand, attribute the phenomenon to nothing more than simple fantasy and wish fulfillment of our desires and dreams.

Then, there’s the psychological standpoint, which generally considers déjà vu to be caused by a memory mismatch that in turn, causes people to feel that they’ve already experienced a specific event that they know is completely novel to them. Though not fully proven, some experts in the field generally agree that déjà vu occurs because of a communication issue between the short term and long term memory, a rare occurrence that functions like a circuit break.

Although the actual cause of déjà vu has yet to be confirmed by science, there are many different theories that attempt to explain how it happens, and they each have interesting implications for the mechanisms of the human brain. For those who are fascinated by this phenomenon and want to try to get to the bottom of this psychological mystery, here are three psychological theories that have been proposed to explain déjà vu!

Causes of Déjà Vu: Dual Processing Theory [False Memories]

One theory suggests that déjà vu is caused by memories failing to form correctly in the brain. This theory is called “dual processing,” and it is the most widely accepted take on this mysterious phenomenon among psychologists. The dual processing theory is based on the way the human brain processes new information and how it stores short-term and long-term memories. Essentially, the theory holds that déjà vu happens when two cognitive processes are momentarily out of sync.

In 1963, Robert Efron at the Veterans Hospital in Boston tested his proposed idea that a delayed neurological response is what causes déjà vu. According to him, because information enters the processing centers of the brain via more than a single path, it is likely that there are instances that the blending of information might not synchronize correctly.

In testing his theory, not only did he find the temporal lobe of the brain’s left hemisphere to be responsible for sorting incoming information, he also discovered that the temporal lobe receives this incoming information twice, but with a milliseconds-long delay between transmission. The information arrives once directly, and a second time after its detour through the right hemisphere of the brain. Should the second transmission get delayed by just slightly longer, then the brain might put a later timestamp on that information and consider it as a different memory from the previous memory already processed by the first transmission. This neurological delay is what could possibly explain the sudden sense of familiarity people feel on certain experiences or events.

Causes of Déjà Vu: ‘Divided Attention’ Theory

Another theory suggests that déjà vu could be triggered by things that we have seen subliminally but we just haven’t registered on a conscious level yet. Called “divided attention,” this theory relies on the brain’s inability to focus on all things at once, which means it has the tendency to momentarily “forget” about other actions or events that are happening in real-time.

According to this theory, it is not necessary for people to actually have experienced an event or a stimulus in the past for déjà vu to occur. Instead, divided attention theory tells us that when we are first exposed to a situation and we are momentarily distracted by something else such as a thought or a sight, this causes us not to pay attention to what’s going on around us. While we may not have consciously taken note of what was happening to our surroundings at the time, we have, however, taken it in unconsciously. But as we regain awareness, the entire sequence of events rushes back to us as eerily familiar, as if our memory is convincing us that we’ve been there before – which we kind-of have, in a way.

Causes of Déjà Vu: ‘Hologram’ Theory

The last theory that we will be discussing is the ‘hologram theory’. Dutch psychiatrist Herman Sno proposed the idea that memories are like holograms, which means that a person can recreate the entire three-dimensional image from any fragment of the whole.

Based on his reasoning, human memories are so interlinked with each other that experiencing just a single fragment is enough for a person’s brain to reconstruct an entire multi-sensory memory. However, there is a caveat to the brain’s automatic process of “filling in the blanks” – and that is, the smaller the fragment, the fuzzier the ultimate picture or scene will be.

According to Sno, déjà vu happens when certain details in the current environment we are in – be it sight, sound, smell or something else – resembles some remnant memory in our past, and our brain recreates a complete picture or an entire scene from that fragment alone. This could be particularly confusing if our memory of that past event is either vague or incomplete since the brain would just have to put in other bits of information to complete the picture, even if the added memory isn’t actually our own. This brings out a feeling of familiarity as well as the powerful sensation of reliving a forgotten memory which in turn could trigger the experience of déjà vu.

And so, based on this theory, you could experience déjà vu when picking up a can just because the feeling of the metal is the same as the bike handle that you once had, or when you go to a restaurant and saw a table cloth without actually remembering that your grandmother also had the same one on her dining table when you were just a small child.

Although déjà vu has been extensively studied as a phenomenon for over a century, and researchers have come up with dozens of advanced theories about its cause, there is no specific theory that claims to be the 100% accurate answer to this mystery. Until now, we can honestly say that there is no simple explanation for how exactly how déjà vu works and why it happens.

Perhaps sometime in the near future – when our technology is advanced enough and we have learned more thoroughly about how the brain works – will we finally be able to unlock the compelling secrets behind this strange phenomenon.

Sources:

https://youtu.be/foVMwJtlR5s

https://youtu.be/nFAvUkjba-Q

http://www.healthguidance.org/entry/17131/1/What-Causes-Deja-Vu.html

http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/extrasensory-perceptions/question657.htm

http://www.brainfacts.org/about-neuroscience/ask-an-expert/articles/2014/what-causes-deja-vu/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/03/15/why-we-get-deja-vu_n_9463818.html

http://listverse.com/2016/06/19/10-fascinating-theories-to-explain-deja-vu/

Dual Processing Theory

http://www.healthguidance.org/entry/17131/1/What-Causes-Deja-Vu.html

https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200503/been-there-done

http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/deja-vu4.htm