What is your theory on why we experience déjà vu – that feeling you've been somewhere or met someone before?

Question

This is the real Denzel Washington. Read the blog for further details:
http://uk.blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-qT1KKPQoRKdVT4lowpJCljbFokkuIzI8?p=1391

Check out the movie at http://uk.movies.yahoo.com/features/deja-vu.html

Answer 1

The electrical signals that allow us to store memories in our brains can take a number of different routes to arrive at their final destination. If a 'memory' in the form of an electrical signal takes a couple of different routes at the same time, it is possible that if one route is longer than the other, it arrives in the memory part of your brain only to find that the same memory has already arrived by a shorter route. This would make you think that you had already experienced the event on a previous occasion. A bit like hearing an echo when a sound wave has been reflected via different paths.
Thats my theory, and I'm happy with it.

Answer 2

Gosh Mr. Washington you have a lot of answers and I have not read them all, some may have given the same answer as me already - in which case I apologise.
There is some actual suggested scientific explanation for deja vu. Some scientists from some university somewhere (I can't remember where) found that actual responses to certain experiences could actually be inherited. Now don't ask me how they found this out. But if your Great Grandfather liked real ale, could that explain why you do ? It is possible, looking at the chemistry of body, surely.
So if your Great Grandmother was bitten by a certain kind of dog that might explain why you might have an aversion to that kind of dog, never having met one in your personal life. Possible ?
If this is the case I would say it might explain mostly the sensation of deja vu in locations rather than individuals. The question is of course endless, ...what if someone shared some of the characteristics of someone your Great Grandfather used to be friendly with, ...would you feel that you had met this person before ? Again possible.
Whether they are your or your ancestors memories I think the same thing is happening. What excellent brains we have and we know so little about them. You may not remember a past experience but your memory will have been taking notes. It is usually significant in some way, but encounter similar criterea again and your brain stem or memory will start ringing your bells - deja vu, or your brain saying to you "hang on a minute we have done this before, I have got this on record wait a minute let me look the responce up !
There is so much we don't know about our minds, our environment, our planet, let alone the universe. Exciting isn't it.

Answer 3

There are a finite number of molecules in the universe. These can move about the universe or stay in a local area, depending on how they are combined. An experience or event requires that certain molecules are arranged in a particular way. These may remained combined for some time and if you happen to sense the arrangement when you come into contact with it, the same event repeated later will have the same molecular configuration. You will perceive this as having been experienced previously but probably won't know when...but you'll call it deja vu...simple really.
Its like have you ever experienced a pleasant day at the beach and then many years later been in an airconditioned room where the temperature reminds you of the time you were at the beach...that's not deja vu but its a similar phenomenon caused by similar arrangement of molecules.
This is an opinion, of course, not scientific fact.

Answer 4

1 I have heard a theory that information to the brain (or different parts of it. can take more than one route at the same time and that deja vu is experienced when the time delay between the two different routes is noticable ( I ie one present event two differently paced means of awareness say stage fright a visceral reaction and an intellectual one at the same time)

2 Personally I believe that some future situations can be predicted by us sub consciously such as meeting a particular person or missing a particular bus say. On the rare occasions that these predictions come true we get the deja vu feeling.
(ie lucky unconscious future guess coming true)
3 Maybe we do experience some future situations or rather elements of them in our dreams or our experience and then forget the dream or experience. When the future situation occurs which is similar to our previous experience or our dream then the similarity
(ie two related events one in the past forgotten)
3b maybe we have experienced the same situation in the past and then forgotten it as it was not important only the repeating of the same situation makes it memorable and then we get that feeling that the situation has happened before but dont remember it well enough call to mind the first occurance of the situation

4 in some cases we can predict future events a few seconds ahead because of knowledge and good guess work (say that a person we know well will say certain words in a particular situation )
again when the event actually occurs we get the impresson before the event occurs that it will happen and then the awareness of the event. (but we may not be aware that the first impression was before the event and in any case by the time we are aware of it both feelings may be felt as current or post event.

5 Maybe deja vu is a mixture of these effects and happens a lot and we only notice it when it occurs in a strong defined way.
Such that the two impressions have a contrast strong enough that the twin feelings evoke the visceral reaction that is deja vu.
as it is a feeling.

6 Maybe deja vu is just a feeling that is not evoked by any stimulus or impression but by some other process taking place that has a blip, such as the normal processes by which we make sense of the world which goes slightly out of whack for a second producing this effect.
(temporary disfunction theory)
Sadly none of my explanations are romantic or magical we could research to find out the answers and see if there are different types of deja vu but that would spoil the fun and mystery
jc




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Answer 5

Deja vu is a phenomonon in which i am sceptical about... we all have deja vu, some more than others and when we experience it we are certain we have seen this before. However i do believe that this is the whole point of deja vu, that we do merely believe we are reliving a previous seen. Similarly to coincidences... there called so as thats what they are just a mere coincidence.

However having been told a friends belief on this situation and read an identical theory on the forum things do make a little bit of sense. My friend believes we are looping our lives constantly i.e. were born, we die, we are reborn same year same day same parents etc. Like the theory!!! However i'm more prone to thinking that we all have some psycic ability. Another user commented that on the day of the london bombings he had had a dream that "London was burning" on that very same day i was woken by a phon call from my housemate and for some bizzare reason when i woke up and heard my phone ringing i had a feeling there had been a terrorist attack in London. I think i had at this point had a psycic encounter. And i believ that we all have them everyday sme massive some little. e.g how many times have you been speaking about someone you havent sen for ages and then they ring you or you see them etc. I know it happens to me all the time.

Definition of deja vu- the illusion of having previously experienced something actually being encountered for the first time.

Therefore if you experiance deja vu you are openly admitting that it is merely an illusion.

Answer 6

1

Answer 7

It usually happens at trivial moments (eg, making toast) but it imbues those moments with a strange gloss of significance, which is why people always go on about past lives, etc, and another mystical stuff. What it must be is the brain retrieving some kind of general situation recognition file, which normally allows us to understand things we are familiar with but also has some emotional content, at the wrong moment. It's obviously something automatic which puts the brain into a mode that we have no control over - we have to wait for the deja-vu to pass before we feel normal again and realize that actually, although we have made toast before, it wasn't exactly like this time... And as it's an automatic file it's probably leftover from when we relied more on instinct, ie, when we were lizards.

That's my theory, Denzel!

By the way - make more films with Spike, they're your best ones!

Answer 8

To be honest, Denzel, I cannot hope to offer a theory. Despite our advances in science and technology and the ability by which we can categorise and quantise all manner of objects and events, there are still far too many areas where doubt remains as to the explanation behind certain 'unexplainable' phenomena.

I've experienced déjà vu on only a few occasions in the past (I'm 41 now) although I have odd sensations at times and feel the hair on my neck stand up when I get an image of a person in my mind. Sometimes it's something as innocent as a phone call from them or an email but recently I had a strong image of my Mum's cousin, less than 12 hours after he passed away and before we had heard the news.

It's possible that we are all wired to 'receive' déjà vu simply because our bodies have the capacity to manipulate electrical fields in our muscles and across our synapses. Since we are bathed in electromagnetic energy all day long from strong radio and television waves, we're probably not as attuned as we should be - like trying to hear a whisper at a rock concert - but there are those still small moments when a message gets through and we experience it as déjà vu.

If members of the animal kingdom are able to sense natural disasters and get clear of that area, then why shouldn't we be able to do the same.

Despite being a stickler for the proof behind things we encounter daily, I have to admit there are events and phenomena that I simply accept until an explanation is made at some point in the future.

If I ever had a premonition that something was about to happen, I really don't know if I would be able to act on it. It would have to be so overwhelmingly strong as to threaten to cause me to have a mental breakdown. If I had a notion, it wouldn't be enough. The authorities would have to see that I was distraught at having been shown this warning to give to them.

I'm looking forward to seeing your film ... it's an interesting topic and guaranteed to make us think!

Cheers!

Answer 9

Having experienced it I fully believe it has nothing to do with the past. I have some theories which I'm making up right now with very little thought because I'm a firm believer in the first answer that comes to mind is the right one and I've never really thought about why we expereince deja vu before!

1) The part of our brain that senses (sees, hears, feels, etc) sometimes moves faster than the part of our brain that compiles all the information and lets us know what we are sensing and when the information gets there it's like we're seeing it in our mind twice.

2) We all exist somewhere on a duplicate plane and occassionally we end up doing the same things in this world as our other selves have already done in the other world.

3) False memories - we only think we've been there before and did the same exact thing at the same exact time in the same exact place.

We may never know the real answer, maybe there is no answer, or we may find the answer to this and many or all questions when we die - but then that leads to another topic altogether.

Answer 10

Déjà vu - French for ‘already seen' - works through paramnesia, a temporary time-dissociation. The incident being lived through for the first time is not related by the mind to the present, but somehow to the past. When the mind grasps that it is actually happening now, it seems to decide that this is the second occasion. Thus, the thoughts of just a micro-second or two earlier now somehow seem to be thrust much further into the past.

Some people explain déjà vu by comparing it to the action of a tape-recorder. The idea is that memories are stored using what amounts to a "recording head" and these memories are recalled by a "playback head" tucked away in the brain. During a déjà vu experience, they suggest, the two "heads" are somehow placed above the same bit of mental "tape", as it were. This results in something being ‘recorded' and ‘replayed' simultaneously, so that the present is experienced as if it were the past.

It's rather like when we think of someone for the first time in years and who do we bump into that very morning?

Answer 11

The brain works on different levels at different speeds.(Much like different computers have different speed CPU chips) The stuff we use for movement and cognitive thought is actually quite slow. It has to be because we can't move as fast as the impulses that are thoughts in transit. They move at electical speeds,.. light-speed minus a bit due to resistance.
Our eyes actually pick up a lot of information and transmit this down the largest single dedicated nerve in the whole body, the Optic Nerve, straight into an area of the brain that handles, amongst other thoughts, subconcsious information, including that which would instigate "flight" from danger or in some cases, "PANIC!"
In an epileptic brain, these signals quite literally get short-circuited to places they would not normally be and the result is that the brain either shuts down (blackout), or becomes so confused, the whole body control system gets jumbled and they have what is commonly seen as convusions (a fit).
In Deja-Vu, the messages from the eye somhow get processed into a situation "response", based on what we did with our memories in dreams, where our brain runs a whole load of possible scenarios using the events of the day, in order to work out how to "file" all the information. This is why, under hypnosis, it is possible to recall events we would never normally recall at all.
The Deja-Vu is the subconcsious replay of a scenario, plus the current events, merged with all other inputs at the same time. They arive in our concsious thoughts a lot earlier than what our (by compasison) slow mechanical reasoning powers can work out and hence, the situation seems strangely familliar! Well, in a way it is, your brain got there ahead of you, just a few milliseconds, but that is a long time in electical terms!
I too have a brain that has had epileptic fits which are now controlled by medication. I have found that by messing with the level of medication, it is possible to almost hang my brain on the edge of this area,..
(I DO NOT SUGGEST ANYONE SHOULD TRY IT!)
..and quite literally play with this high-speed version of reality. As everyone has basically the same brian functions (the EEG machine shows this quite well), anyone can have a Deja-Vu.
Then of course there is Jung's version of the "collective concsiousness" which is a theory that suggests we share certain thoughts by empathy. That can be also backed up by the electrical rule that if you pass a current through any conductor, it generates an electromagnetic waveform,.. a RADIO wave! Thus it is not beyond the scope of science to prove that other people's thoughts may also play a part in this experience.