 so like millions of other people this weekend I went out and saw the brand new movie us from the amazing Jordan Peele there's a bunch of channels out there doing reviews of the movie as well as throwing out their theories of the ending and other things like that inside the movie but in this video I want to take a look at the very real condition in which people believe that other people around them have been replaced by imposters and I got some great news for you whether you've seen this movie or not it's all good baby because this is completely spoiler free what is up everybody this is Chris from the rewired soul where we talk about the problem but focus on the solution and if you're new to my channel my channel is all about mental health but I'm also a psychology nerd and I love learning about psychology as well as different mental health conditions and all of that and try teaching them to all of you as well so if you're into that stuff make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell because I'm always taking things from pop culture like movie tv music and all of that to make some videos so anyways um my beautiful girlfriend and Tristan and I we just got back from seeing the movie us last night mwah amazing movie go out and see it but before we went out and saw the movie I was kind of like going down this rabbit hole just watching a bunch of different interviews with Jordan Peele as well as the cast members because get out was a phenomenal movie and I knew this movie was going to be great as well so I kind of want to get inside the mind of Jordan Peele and I watched a bunch of videos of him like explaining you know what horror movies he liked growing up and things like that and also where his idea for this movie us came from and I actually came across this clip when did you get the idea for this one uh the idea came you know I I've been terrified of the idea of doppelgangers since I was a kid I had uh you know I always had this vision of like seeing myself across the subway platform and just kind of thought like what if you saw yourself and then you're like if that's not creepy enough what if you went like you know the other you sort of smiled at you and so this this kind of this idea of like all right what's that about and um you know I've been I put it at the idea of a doppelganger family I thought was like okay well then my imagination went crazy and out came this film so yeah after watching that clip and seeing that he had this like fear when he was a child of like seeing a doppelganger version of himself I was seeing that I think I'm like huh I wonder if this is like a real thing I wonder if this is isolated like Jordan Peele is the only one who worries about this or if others might worry about it as well and the other thing that I was thinking about was that movie The Truman Show with Jim Carrey way back in the day and I was wondering if this movie might trigger some delusions in people so those of you who don't know about the Truman Show the Truman Show was a movie starring Jim Carrey in which his entire life was being filmed and it was inside this like super dome and everybody in there was actors and everything well after that movie came out there was a lot of people who suffered from the delusion that they were inside the Truman Show all right so I was wondering like huh I wonder if this might lead to something like that okay so anyways I did some research and there is actually something called the Copgra delusion okay and this comes from the French psychiatrist Joseph Copgra okay so the Copgra delusion is also known as the imposter delusion which should not be confused with imposter syndrome which is something completely different but Joseph Copgra saw this way back in like the late 1800s early 1900s where he was seeing cases of people who thought people in their lives were being replaced by imposters so once learning about that I'm like okay how many other people struggle with this and who is like the expert who is out there studying this delusion right so there is actually a man by the name of Dr. VS Ramachandran okay so he is actually the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of San Diego okay so he does a lot of studies around you know this idea that the movie us might actually you know be real in some people's minds so in an article from the American Psychological Association they actually talk about you know Dr. Ramachandran and some of his findings so what's interesting is this right here where some people believe that this is actually Freudian so Freudian what does that mean well uh Dr. Sigmund Freud he had this idea that you know all young men they have this like sexual desire for their mothers so some people believe that the cop-graw delusion comes from that so by believing that one's mother for example is an imposter then you don't really have to feel bad about your you know sexual fantasies of your mother if they're an imposter but there are actually people who struggle with the cop-grass delusion who for example believe that their their dog was replaced by an imposter and Dr. Ramachandran says and I quote I don't know how Freudians would explain that one so what does Dr. VS Ramachandran actually believe this is what does he believe that the cop-grass delusion actually is so in this article from the American Psychological Association it states research by Ramachandran and others suggests an alternative explanation it seems that in healthy people the brain's visual cortex relates information through two routes one that goes to the temporal lobe where face recognition occurs and one that goes to the limbic system which registers an emotional reaction in cop-graw patients the route from the visual cortex to the limbic system is damaged but the route to the temporal lobe remains unharmed causing the person to see a woman who looks like his mother but who sparks no emotional response the mind explains that discrepancy by insisting that the woman is an imposter Ramachandran posits so what they actually did to Ramachandran as well as a buddy of his who's a philosopher they did some experiments where they hooked people up to something that detected skin conductance okay so basically what they did was they sat people down and they showed them a bunch of pictures so for example they sit a young man down who might be suffering from the cop-graw delusion and they show them pictures of a bunch of random people right and then they would show them a picture of their own mother and basically what the skin conductance does is they'll have a reaction like an emotional reaction your body actually reacts when you have an emotional response but people with the cop-graw delusion did not have any change in their skin conductance whereas they took a control group and they did the same thing but when showed pictures of their mother or different family members the skin to conductance changed right because they had an emotional response to this so part of this delusion is that the mind believes that if you're not having an emotional response to somebody right like that's close to you your mother your father your your husband your wife whoever it is then they must be an imposter that's what the brain tells them so in this article from Psychology Today Dr. Ramachandran he actually talked about one of the patients that he worked with who suffered from the cop-graw delusion where when he would see his own father he didn't have any kind of emotional reaction he thought his father was an imposter and all that but whenever he spoke to his father on the phone he believed that it was his father so what Dr. Ramachandran argues is that yes this is an issue with the visual cortex so humans are very visual creatures okay like we see things and then we process them so if if that's like the strongest part of your brain processing things visually when you see somebody you're not having that emotional response but when it's completely auditory like on the phone then that emotional response might happen because you don't have anything to visualize so there's a bunch of different reasons as to why the cop-graw delusion happens so in this post from Medical News Today they talk about the different instances of it so this is seen a lot with people who are suffering from Alzheimer's disease as well as dementia but when it comes to psychological disorders this is commonly seen in different forms of schizophrenia so how do you treat this thing in the article from Medical News Today they talk about some of the most common treatments for the cop-graw delusion include antipsychotics therapy surgery as well as memory and recognition medications all right so what they also talk about is one of the most common forms of therapy that they use for people who are suffering from the cop-graw delusion is validation therapy and what that is is basically it's a therapeutic technique in which the therapist is working with the person to validate their beliefs to validate their delusions and the goal of this therapy is to help reduce that anxiety so if you can imagine just for a minute thinking that you know your own mother is an imposter a therapist working with that person they're gonna help calm down that anxiety because you can get pretty anxious thinking that you know this woman you know has replaced your mother so that's actually interesting to me because just based on some of the other research I've done and looking at different psychological disorders like for example bipolar disorder when somebody is in a manic state and they're having these kind of you know grandiose delusions like one of the things that you don't do is play into that but since this seems like it's more of a brain issue maybe it's more about you know harm reduction if you will but anyways anyways I thought this was just really interesting just after seeing the movie us and you know interviews with Jordan Peele and then finding out that this is an actual condition that people are struggling with but anyways if you've seen the movie us let me know what you think about that movie down below I'm actually thinking about doing one more video about it um because there were some themes around PTSD and anxiety um so yeah if you want me to do one of those videos let me know down in the comments below but anyways that's all I got for this video if you liked this video please give it a thumbs up if you're new make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell because I make a ton of videos and a huge huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on patreon you are all amazing and if you would like to get involved in our monthly Q&A and exclusive content and all sorts of stuff click a tap on that icon right there all right thanks so much for watching I'll see you next time