Have you ever got a feeling that you’ve been to an unknown place before, or have previously experienced a situation, or met a person before? We called this “Déjà vu”. It is an unexpected sensation of familiarity that applies to events, experience, sensory impressions, dreams etc which in general, the circumstances of living.
The term “Déjà vu” comes from French which means “already seen”. Psychiatrists defined it as “any subjectively inappropriate impression of familiarity of a present experience with an undefined past”. It was first used by E. Letter Boirac in 1876 to describe its experience. In some studies, it shown more women has experienced this phenomenon than men, and occurs higher in young people than aged.
During the past decades, there is a wide variance in theories explaining Déjà vu.
Some believed that it is just simply the mismatch made by brain related to memory and recollection. As brain only needs bits of sensory information to reconstruct the whole image, thus it may bring forward the entire memory image by taken the similar detailed experience in the past.
Another explanation for Déjà vu is that it is caused by the random firings of neurons in the temporal or frontal lobe portions of brain. The frontal lobe acts as a short term storage area and acts in conjunction with temporal lobe to solve logic problem or make decisions etc. Once the misfiring of neurons mistakenly place current sensory in the wrong “time slot”, thus “Déjà vu” may arise.
In some of the studies, it also points out that people are more likely to have experience déjà vu if they:
- Have an active imagination and recall their dreams easily.
- Are fatigued or under stress.
- Have extremely high levels of education and higher income.
- Are open-minded or politically liberal
To help with current research conducted by Dr. Funkhouser in exploring of Deja experience, Click here to finish the survey
Further Readings:
1. James Geary – Been There, Done that
2. Julia Johnson - UGH! I Just Got the Creepiest Feeling That I Have Been Here Before:Déjà vu and the Brain, Consciousness and Self
3. David Glenn – Psychologists are dusting off 19th-century explanations of déjà vu. Have we been here before?
4. Todd Murphy – Déjà vu: Here and Now, There and Then.
