A 23-year-old student was diagnosed with severe déjà vu, which means "already seen" in French. This is a rare condition and is said to be the first that is triggered by anxiety. The student suffered so much that he dropped out of his university as well. The details of the case have been published in the Journal of Medical Case Reports.

According to the Daily Mail, the 23-year-old said that he had a fear that he was reliving the past moment and that his life was like an enactment of Groundhog Day, a movie about a man stuck in a time warp. The student, who wanted to be unnamed, had said that his feelings were stronger and more frequent when compared to a normal sense of déjà vu.

Initially, he was aware of the fact that what he was experiencing was unreal and then three years after his first attack, the episodes seemed to grow in intensity. Experts from various universities like Sheffield Hallam, Leeds, King's College London, Exeter and even universities in Canada and France have analysed his case. His brain scans seemed to appear normal.

Dr Christine Wells, lecturer in Cognitive Psychology and the author of the report, said that rather than the unsettling feelings of familiarity associated with déjà vu, the student had complaints that he was not just finding the experiences familiar, but that he was actually retrieving the experiences from memory.

She explained that most cases like the student's occurred due to a side effect that was linked to dementia or epileptic seizures. She said that his condition was linked to anxiety which was causing mistimed neural firing in the student's brain, which in turn caused more déjà vu.

In previous cases of severe déjà vu, those experiencing it were said to be suffering from neurological conditions like dementia and epilepsy. But this was the time that anxiety was seen as a trigger for it. Leading scientists have said that anxiety disorders might be more related to the condition than what was previously believed. They said that it could be a trigger, which is similar to that of panic attacks.

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