Deja Vu

Ever had an eerie feeling on a dinner table when suddenly you look someone/something that you have seen the one/thing before in the perfectly the same setting earlier and then as if in aura of trance, when you turn the head to a side you find the next sequences very logical and consistent with your previous experiences? You somehow find that this sequence couldn’t have been in a dream, from previous experience ‘coz the way a person is holding the spoon and rotating, it just couldn’t be repeated/imitated, ‘coz the way a person is smiling and lifting the finger bowl and passing it on is simply so unique!

Well some of you know that the name for such experiences is Déjà vu. But what most of you may not know is that the correct and closest term for such 'already experienced' or 'already lived through feeling is Déjà vécu.

Déjà vu (French: "already seen", also called paramnesia) describes the experience of feeling that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation previously. The term was given by Emile Boirac.

Types
Déjà vécu- the kind of experiences one-third of the population, mostly highly educated people / frequent travelers, goes through between the age of 15 and 25.
Déjà senti - a feeling of having already ‘felt something’. It’s primarily a mental happening sans precognitive experience, induced by some thought mental/verbalized but in the end only the feeling of feeling remains, the causal thought blurs out.
Déjà visité - an uncanny knowledge of some place, town or landscape. Dreams, reincarnation, out-of-the-body travel and extensive reading of a place have been evoked as reasons.

Myth: déjà vu is an act of "precognition" or "prophecy". Actually it is an anomaly of memory; it is the impression that an experience is "being recalled" which is false. Even you will admit that when experiencing these things, the sense of recollection is strong but a precise knowledge of the previous incident (when, where, how) is uncertain. Likewise later there is little or no recollection of the details of the incident/experience.

Causes:

• Overlap between neurological systems responsible for short term (responsible for present events) and long term memory (responsible for past events).


• Certain disorders such as schizophrenia, anxiety, epilepsy. Another reasons attributed to are improper electrical discharge in the brain resulting in a mild epileptic episode- a jerk, similar to what most people have just before sleep.


• Associated with precognition, clairvoyance but never reproduced in clinical research.


• An extension of dreams/scenes; the ones which are in subconscious mind.

Other Experiences

• Jamais vu: explicitly “not remembering” having seen something before coupled with a rational knowledge of having been in the situation before.


• Presque vu: "almost seen," the expression means almost, but not quite, remembering something. A kind of “on the tip of the tongues” experience.


• Déjà éprouvé: "already attempted or tried"

Trivia

• It is supposed to originate in temporal lobe behind the head.


• Experiments have been conducted to reproduce the feeling of Deja visite and related feelings of unconscious familiarity.

My Observations

• The research has been mainly done on the visual part. It is silent on the other aspects of sensory perception such as smell, touch, sound etc.


• The argument of little recollection of details incident/experience doesn’t hold true in many cases. People may remember them


• The first cause of such experiences might explain the reason for slight state of trance.


• I used to have those feelings when I was still a student, preferred not to come out of the house and definitely was no scholar at all.


• I am not special and won’t ever know what future has in for me or anybody else.