The student, whose name has not been disclosed, experienced such a strong sensation of having done things before that he found himself barely able to function and had to drop out of university.
The feeling became so overwhelming that he was forced to stop participating in several otherwise innocuous everyday activities such as watching the television, reading books or listening to the radio. He described feeling as though he were trapped inside a time loop like in the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day.
While most of us will have experienced at least some level of déjà vu during our lifetime, there is a chance that these feelings can get out of control in patients suffering from a pre-existing neurological condition such as dementia or temporal lobe epilepsy.
In this case however extensive brain scans revealed no evidence of any problems.
"Rather than simply the unsettling feelings of familiarity which are normally associated with déjà vu, our subject complained that it felt like he was actually retrieving previous experiences from memory, not just finding them familiar," said psychology expert Dr Christine Wells.
"This could be the first-ever recorded instance of psychogenic déjà vu, which is déjà vu triggered by anxiety rather than a neurological condition such as dementia or epilepsy."
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