What's your take on this..? Its somewhat interesting in a queer
way..
Déjà vu is an uncanny feeling or illusion of having already seen or
experienced something that is being experienced for the first time.
If we assume that the experience is actually of a remembered event,
then déjà vu probably occurs because an original experience was
neither fully attended to nor elaborately encoded in memory. If so,
then it would seem most likely that the present situation triggers
the recollection of a fragment from one's past. The experience may
seem uncanny if the memory is so fragmented that no strong
connections can be made between the fragment and other
memories.
Thus, the feeling that one has been there before is often due to
the fact that one has been there before. One has simply forgotten
most of the original experience because one was not paying close
attention the first time. The original experience may even have
occurred only seconds or minutes earlier.
On the other hand, the déjà vu experience may be due to having seen
pictures or heard vivid stories many years earlier. The experience
may be part of the dim recollections of childhood.
However, it is possible that the déjà vu feeling is triggered by a
neurochemical action in the brain that is not connected to any
actual experience in the past. One feels strange and identifies the
feeling with a memory, even though the experience is completely
new.
The term was applied by Emile Boirac (1851-1917), who had strong
interests in psychic phenomena. Boirac's term directs our attention
to the past. However, a little reflection reveals that what is
unique about déjà vu is not something from the past but something
in the present, namely, the strange feeling one has. We often have
experiences the novelty of which is unclear. In such cases we may
have been led to ask such questions as, "Have I read this book
before?" "Is this an episode of Inspector Morse I've seen before?"
"This place looks familiar; have I been here before?" Yet, these
experiences are not accompanied by an uncanny feeling. We may feel
a bit confused, but the feeling associated with the déjà vu
experience is not one of confusion; it is one of strangeness. There
is nothing strange about not remembering whether you've read a book
before, especially if you are fifty years old and have read
thousands of books over your lifetime. In the déjà vu experience,
however, we feel strange because we don't think we should feel
familiar with the present perception. That sense of
inappropriateness is not present when one is simply unclear whether
one has read a book or seen a film before.
Thus, it is possible that the attempt to explain the déjà vu
experience in terms of lost memory, past lives, clairvoyance, and
so on may be completely misguided. We should be talking about the
déjà vu feeling. That feeling may be caused by a brain state, by
neurochemical factors during perception that have nothing to do
with memory. It is worth noting that the déjà vu feeling is common
among psychiatric patients. The déjà 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 déjà vu.
