EntertainmentWhat is Déjà Vu?
Thu, Apr 11 2007
Say, for example, you are having dinner with a group of friends, discussing some current political topic, and you have the feeling that you've already experienced this very thing, same friends, same dinner and same topic. I believe at least once in your life you have experience similar, maybe not so powerful sense of familiarity.
In the very essence a person who experiences Deja Vu does not have any clue whatever that something is going to happen (like Precognition), but merely has the sensation (during and afterward) of having already experienced the scene.
The phenomenon is rather complex, and there are many different theories and notions as to why Deja Vu happens. Swiss scholar Arthur Funkhouser suggests that there are several "Deja Vu experiences" and asserts that in order to better study the phenomenon, the nuances between the experiences need to be noted. But still modern science does not have adequate explanations for any of these apparent phenomena.
From a psychological standpoint
For many years, psychologists have known of the phenomenon of Deja Vu, where a patient is absolutely convinced that a first visit to an area seemed like a place already familiar and known.
Deja Vu is different from various similar phenomena such as Precognition where a person has a premonition of some future event or Clarivoyance where a person comes to know about some simultaneous event a long distance away or assorted other unusual phenomena.
Some researchers, including Swiss scientist Arthur Funkhouser, firmly believe that precognitive dreams are the source of many Deja Vu experiences. J.W. Dunne, an aeronautical engineer who designed planes in World War II, conducted studies in 1939 using students of Oxford University. His studies found 12.7 percent of his subjects' dreams to have similarities with future events. Recent studies, including one by Nancy Sondow in 1988, have had similar results of 10 percent.
From a scientific standpoint
If you think about it, you can see how impossible it is to document such Deja Vu experiences to be of value to any scientific investigation.
You didn't know that something surprising was about to happen, so you could not even have written down any notes, as might be possible for Precognition or Clairvoyance. And no other person could even confirm the "feeling" of familiarity he had, so there is no way to advance such an experience beyond merely being anecdotal evidence.
As a result, there is virtually nothing of scientific value to even confirm that the phenomenon of Deja Vu even exists! Except from the words of those people who have experienced it! Still, from this notion it's widely supported that feeling may be caused by a brain state, by neurochemical factors during perception that have nothing to do with memory. The Deja Vu feeling also frequently precedes temporal lobe epilepsy attacks.
When Wilder Penfield did his famous experiment in 1955 in which he electrically stimulated the temporal lobes, he found about 8% of his subjects experienced "memories." He assumed he elicited actual memories. They could well have been hallucinations and the first examples of artificially stimulated Deja Vu.
From a paranormal standpoint
Is there anything paranormal about Deja Vu? I would say no. It's more of an awareness experience. Still some paranormal investigators explain that this experience is connected with lost memory, past lives, clairvoyance, and so on.
No dough there is no simple explanation for what it means or why it happens. Perhaps as technology advances and we learn more about how the brain works, we will also learn more about why we experience this strange phenomenon.
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