What is déjà vu?
Have you ever had that uncanny feeling of ‘I have been here before’ even though it was the very first time you have been to a place? This feeling is popularly dubbed as déjà vu (French for ‘already seen’) and it describes the experience of feeling that one has witnessed or experienced previously, an entirely new situation.
Everyone has experienced the unsettling mystery of déjà vu--that flash of memory when you meet someone new you feel you've known all your life or recognize a place even though you've never been there before.
A THEORY ON THE DEJA VU
For many years, psychologists have known of the phenomenon of Déjà Vu, where a patient is absolutely convinced that a first visit to an area seemed like a place already familiar and known.
During the time while this web-page has been on the Internet, more than two thousand people (up to Nov 2006) have e-mailed to say that they have Deja Vu experiences. That is interesting, but their descriptions have virtually always described some different phenomenon. If a person has any pre-knowledge of something that is yet to happen, like in a dream, it cannot be Deja Vu, and is likely to be some type of Precognition. (Even if the Precognition is only a few seconds before the event.) A person cannot know that a Deja Vu experience is coming, and also, it is also always sensed as INSTANTANEOUS, as being a sudden realization that an experience "was somehow familiar".
This last part effectively eliminates Deja Vu from occurring in any place that the person has already been! The problem is that your mind has countless thousands of memories in it of all the days of all the previous years that you have lived, and, simply to maintain your sanity, your brain "forgets" most of them, even though they are still recorded somewhere in your brain. These "forgotten memories" are a well-known phenomena in all of us.
So, if you are in a familiar environment, and you get a feeling that you "had experienced this before" the reality MIGHT be that you actually had! When your brain sees a PATTERN in an experience, it seems to have the ability to "suddenly remember" forgotten memories which happened to have a very similar pattern in them. This can therefore SEEM like it is a deja vu experience, of that spooky familiarity, but where the explanation is very mundane, simply a forgotten thought from three years earlier. Because forgotten memories are so common in us, then IF you are in a familiar environment when you get a sensation that you think might be deja vu, it is actually far more likely that it was simply a forgotten memory instead.
Therefore, the credibility of a deja vu as being valid generally hinges on it being in an environment or situation that you HAVE NEVER POSSIBLY EXPERIENCED EVER BEFORE. Thus the described requirement of a new place. Yes, a deja vu COULD also occur in a familiar situation, but there is so strong a possibility that it would be a forgotten memory that any credibility as an actual deja vu must generally be dismissed.
Now, YOU certainly believe that you can remember ALL the experiences you have ever had, and that there could not possibly be any forgotten memories in you! You are probably wrong about that! You may be familiar with Oprah Winphrey's situation. For many years on her TV program, she had conversations with girls and women who had been raped, and she often expressed her feeling that she could not possibly know what they had gone through. But eventually, Oprah had had forgotten memories re-appear to her, and she came to learn that SHE had been raped (repeatedly, as I recall) as a child! She found it astounding that she had not ever known that had happened to her! The most traumatic event that could ever happen to a young girl, and she had had absolutely no (conscious) memory that it had ever happened to her! In such extreme cases, the human mind seems to have the ability of CREATING a hysterical amnesia, so the person is able to proceed with life without having to be destroyed by such constant memories. There are many thousands of well-documented cases of such blanked-out memories, of war-time experiences, of rapes, of incidents where the person had accidentally caused serious injury or death of a dear relative or friend.
So our minds are definitely CAPABLE of absolutely eliminating some memories from our consciousness. But what I am more directly addressing here is that our minds also USUALLY find it desirable to forget MOST of the mundane activities of our daily lives! We are all chock full of forgotten memories!
Here is a hypothetical example of Deja Vu, assuming that you are not an Eskimo! On your first trip EVER to some desolate village in northern Alaska, you are invited into an igloo. The moment you are inside, and see everything, you suddenly feel that you "already knew" where everything was. Specifically, you notice something that you consider unusual, but sense that you somehow were familiar with that elk leg or whatever. You obviously could not have known, but you have an instantaneous sensation that you "must have already been there" even though you know that was impossible. Notice that you do NOT know what is in the next room, before you actually go there. (If that pre-knowledge occurs, it would be Precognition.)
Here is another potential example of what an actual deja vu might be. You are driving cross-country, and have never been to Utah before. You stop for gas, and need to use their restroom. As you enter, you find a full-size fireplace INSIDE THE BATHROOM! Now, no one expects to see a large fireplace inside a public bathroom, so it would be an experience that you probably had never experienced in any OTHER bathroom! And you had certainly never been to THIS one. And yet, immediately AFTER this experience, you have the weird sensation that you had "been there before". THAT would be a Deja vu. Notice that you did not "predict" seeing anything unusual, EVEN A SECOND AHEAD, and that you only had the Deja vu sensation AFTER actually seeing it. And that you could not possibly convince anyone that you had previously experienced that, because any listener would insist it was impossible. (If you had ANY pre-knowledge, even a second earlier, it could not actually be a Deja vu, and would probably be some sort of Precognition).
In order for it to be a credible Deja vu experience, it needs to be some experience that is clearly different from any forgotten memory you might have had, which generally also means something truly surprising. (Our brains have millions of such forgotten memories, like of smells or songs or old friends, which seem to be able to get triggered sometimes, and that is NOT Deja vu.)
Déjà vu is different from various similar phenomena such as Precognition [where a person has a premonition of some future event] or Clairvoyance [where a person comes to know about some simultaneous event a long distance away] or assorted other unusual phenomena.) Modern science does not have adequate explanations for ANY of these apparent phenomena.http://www.answers.com
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http://www.spiritualresearchfoundation.org
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