The How and Why behind The Déjà Vu

  Have you ever found yourself in a moment in time that felt utterly familiar that brought you chills down your spine? It is as if you stepped in a transporter that held the key to a portal down an eerily known memory lane, where you unexpectedly dug up a memory that didn't feel as it originated from this lifetime, at all. In these kinds of occasions, you ask yourself: "Are you reliving some past life memories. is your consciousness downloading some information from a parallel life from another dimension you are somehow tunning into (if at all possible), are maybe your dreams the source of this experience or just your brain is playing some ungraspable tricks on you?" Well, a few of these wanderings are found to be true. So let's delve into this matter from different perspectives.

This is perhaps a way for our brain to check out our stored memory inputs, take up fragments of them and put them in a new context, give them a new challenge per se.  This way this new event is somehow very recognizable.  But if this is true, every experience we've had would be a memory test of a remembered action. For example, you are in a foreign city and you find a street that is very similar to a street in your hometown. You realize this similarity consciously and it doesn't evoke a déjà vu event, it simply isn't the same feeling. 

A team of scientists in Budapest, with Akira O' Connor as the head scientist of the experiment also made a contribution to the research of this intriguing phenomenon. They had comprised a study group of participants who were presented with a group of logically linked words in order to remember them, such as: table, food, afternoon and cutlery. Meanwhile, the scientists omitted the keyword "lunch" that linked them together. In order to make sure they hadn't heard this link word, they asked them if they had heard a word beginning with "L" to which all answers were negative. After a while, they asked the involved participants to retell the series of words and many of them swore to have heard the keyword "lunch" too along with the other ones, thereby reporting a certain déjà vu like feeling. This experiment was an attempt to induce a déjà vu artificially in order to study the whereabouts of its occurrence in the mind. Interestingly, while experiencing this, the neurons in the decision making prefrontal cortex of the brain fired up, instead of the ones in the temporal lobe (responsible for recalling long-term memories) as it was expected.

Even though they have come very close to explaining it, yet their approach was not completely conclusive as their methods actually activated the obvious associative conscious mechanisms of thinking. There is another scientific theory that also makes a lot of sense. A memory is formed by combining all the sensory inputs of smell, taste, sight, and touch from an event together as one input in the brain, though when one stimulus, from one event, precedes the other, it is captured by the brain as the event happened twice, and that might fire the feeling of familiarity. When a memory is being saved it is first filtered through the short-term memory and then it is sent to the long-term memory storage. It is believed that when a déjà vu happens, the memory kind of skips the short-term memory and jumps directly onto the long-term memory lane. Who knows what kind of reorganization happen in the back (or front) of our mind during these kinds of events, but, well it is in our curious nature as humans to try to explain things to ourselves. While we are at it, there was another scientist, the Swiss researcher Arthur Funkhouser who matched the déjà vu experiences to the precognitive dreams. Some of his subjects, back in the 1980s reported that the dreams they had many years ago had actual connections to real future events and déjà vu later in their lives.

In my experience, according to my intuition, I believe that these kinds of dreams have a lot to do with déjà vu. I have experienced this multiple times in my life and each time I have had the feeling that I have already dreamt about this when I was quite younger. Maybe these are the dreams that we've seem to forgotten in the past but now emerge to the surface. If that is the case, then through these dreams we can predict the future, without even being conscious at the time we have them. Perhaps this is another proof that in our mind lies tremendous potential we are often forgetful of, and the déjà vu phenomenon is but a reminder that we can travel back and forth through our own remembering time machine. So, what kind of déjà trip have you had down the subconscious memory lane so far?