Wonders: August 2006

A déjà vu is a french expression, when translated to English it literally means "already seen".

It is when you experience something for the first time and it feels like you have been there, done that. Everything about the experience seems familiar, the scenery, the people and the topic being discussed.

Psychologists have noticed that the majority of people experience this, though it mostly occures with the age group between 15-25 years old.

It's still unknown what causes this, due to the complexity of it, yet there has been several theories.

1. Herman Sno a psychiatrist believes that it has to do with brain interpretation delay, i.e. you experience something and the brain mistakingly stores it as a past memory This split-second delay in cognition creates the unsettling impression that the event "is being experienced and recalled simultaneously.

2. Some like to believe that it is a glimpse of a past life. Personally i don't agree, because people who believe in past lives say that every time you live a different life AKA reencarnation. So if every time you are living a different life there's no way to experience something in one life and then experience it exactly the same in another life.

3. Another theory would say that a baby in its mother's womb sees it's life as a tape, and as a grown up when experiencing something it feels familiar.

4. Another Sno theory that explains the déjà vu occureing due to the storing of memories in the human brain as holograms. a hologram is a 3d image including voice and smell. A full experience is stored in the brain as a group of holograms. Any small part of this memory will evoke the complete thing.

According to this a déjà vu occures when a small part of a current experience resembles to a part of a past experience stored in memory, thus giving the elussion that you have already experienced this.

The only thing I completely agree with is what Freud had to say about it, he placed the deja vu experience in "the category of the miraculous" and predicted that "the subject would merit the most exhaustive treatment.