Déjà vu

The words "Déjà vu" come from French meaning "already seen" and they express a feeling that we often get when we have experiences that we are convinced we have had before.  Things begin to feel familiar to us, often with the ability to predict how things will progress and when they do progress as we predicted we end up in a state of mind similar to confusion where we wonder how or why we are apparently able to predict the future.  There are of course many different explanations for this feeling and some attempt to give concrete reasons as to why it happens.  Not all of these explanations are able to address the feeling in its entirety however and in some cases I do believe there is no suitable explanation that can be given other than to say that the truth is nobody really knows why it occurs in those instances.

One popular explanation for why the feeling occurs is that supposition that it is a momentary lapse in the brain's processing where something passes into long term memory before it is passed into short term memory this results in the normal process being interrupted, when the information is finally processed in the short term memory it connected to our long term memory making us feel like this is something we have prior experience of when in fact it is this experience itself that we are remembering just by different parts of the brain in the wrong order.

Whilst this explanation can be satisfactory for momentary feelings, it doesn't explain those situations where you experience an extended feeling of Déjà vu.  In other words it doesn't explain an experience that is continuing to happen where we can predict what is going to happen some time before it does, then we sit and observe and it then occurs.  There are alternate explanations that do attempt to address these situations however.  In a previous post I discussed the nature of three brains, the structure of the human mind posed by Sigmund Freud where the mind is split into the conscious, subconscious and unconscious mind, each with its own purpose.  One explanation of Déjà vu is that it occurs when we experience with our conscious mind a scenario that the unconscious mind has anticipated, already run through all the permutations of what might happen, and is feeding our conscious mind through the subconscious, information about what is going to happen next.  In other words our unconscious mind realizes "hey I've seen this before, this happens next..." and our subconscious then suggests what might happen next, and as each event occurs the unconscious mind continues "and then this happened..." and the whole scenario plays out with the feeling of Déjà vu ending when we reach the limit of the unconscious mind's prior simulation.

I really like this explanation because to me it fits most succinctly with my experiences of Déjà vu.  There is one other type of experience however that I feel the need to mention, that is the scenario where we realise we have actually experienced these events before, not just because they feel familiar but because they really did happen before.  This whole post was inspired by an app I installed on my phone thinking it was the first time I had done so.  It was a game and I played through it for some days with varying degrees of success.  I eventually hit a wall where I could not progress and spent some time trying to overcome the obstacle.  In the repetition of that time, I began to feel frustrated, it was only then when I was becoming fixated on the game that I had a sudden realisation that I had played this game before, and I had never managed to pass that level.  I believe in that moment the frustration of the game had passed the content to my unconscious mind to process at which point it recognised it and simply responded "we've done this before and we couldn't solve it last time either" which led to the realisation I had installed the app many years ago on a different phone.  I had completely forgotten that fact.  So sometimes Déjà vu isn't something mystical or mysterious, sometimes it really does just mean, you have seen it before, maybe you just don't remember where or when, but you have.

Déjà vu represents something enigmatic about the way we process our experiences.  We have made many advances in medical science and we have advanced fields like psychology by a great deal in recent decades, but there is still so much about our minds that we do not understand.  In particular when you begin to study psychology to any great extent, either academically or out of interest like I did, you begin to realise that many of the theories and the approaches that are still dominant within the field today are decades old and whilst they have been challenged many times, those that have hung around have done so because they are often the simplest explanations that make the least assumptions.  Whilst our technology may be progressing, we as human beings have changed very little in terms of the way we work inside.  Evolution in this regard is incredibly slow, and there is an argument that can be made that would posit that human evolution has effectively halted in terms of our physiology because we no longer engage in natural selection - the latter of which most people agree is a good thing, the former however poses an interesting question of what our future holds if we aren't adapting internally to a changing world.