Do you ever have a "Deja-vu Moment?"
You know, one of those moments where you feel like you've "been there before," but it's not just a vague memory of sorts, it seems to real you're ready to predict the next person who's going to walk around the corner.
Do you find yourself wondering what it means?
Have I Been Here Before?
Have you seen this flower before?
Deja-vu is typically defined along the lines of "Having the feeling that a new experience (to you) has actually happened before." The term is derived from French, and loosely means "already seen" or "previously seen."
I have had a lot of very strong deja-vu moments in my life.
Science doesn't offer a conclusive explanation for the phenomenon.
One popular theory holds that the brain momentarily "loses its place" and attributes something that happened a split-second earlier (short term memory) to a time in the distant past (long term memory). This gives us the false impression that we're "recalling" something that essentially happened in the current moment.
Other theories suggest a connection of a current event to a "false" recollection of a part event.
Yet others believe a deja-vu to be an example of precognition. Either way, the phenomenon has been studied for a long time, but nobody seems quite sure what the deal is.
Cabbage white butterfly in the sun
Most recently, it has been theorized that deja-vu is the result of the brain's own memory-checking system; accessing past (but forgotten) memories similar to the present, with the brain misinterpreting the present as already having happened.
The "precognition" theories are generally dismissed because the person who experienced the deja-vu typically has difficulty explaining or recalling where they first experienced the event.
Personally? I'm not so sure.
I have experienced more than a few deja-vu feelings, and found myself able to tell what was going to happen next, before those things actually happened. I even shared it out loud with others, before it happened. It was almost like having had a dream, and knowing how the rest of it would unfold.
I expect such experiences represent a minority of deja-vu situations. In any case, I find the phenomenon interesting and fun to talk about.
How About YOU? Have you ever had a deja-vu? How "real" did it feel, to you? Do you believe deja-vu's are "memory glitches?" Do you think they might be some kind of precognition? Leave a comment-- share your experiences and feedback-- be part of the conversation!
(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for Steemit)
Published 20170917 16:19 PDT
My theory (as one who has experienced this and thought about it) is that everything that could possibly exist, pre-exists in potential until it manifests in the particular time line one is experiencing.
Awareness can, most often in certain kinds of dreams and/or altered states of awareness, experience the potential of an event. Then, when awake or in a normal state consciousness, if the event manifests in the particular time line that one is experiencing, then the sense of deja vu occurs.
Also, a "present moment' is certainly not the same for all consciousnesses. The "present" may be far greater and contain far more for some forms of consciousness than for others. As one very mundane example: The present moment for an observer in an airplane is far greater, vis a vis two pedestrians approaching each other around a corner, then it is for either of the two pedestrians.
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As you can (obviously!) tell, I wasn't brave enough to tackle the quantum physics angle on this; perhaps the result of having spent too many years around skeptics dead set on dismantling anything not reproducible in a lab as "bogus." But I can't explain that I had a deja-vu and "next thing that's going to happen is the FedEx truck will pull in the driveway and deliver a package..."
I would say there are infinite potential states, and sometimes perhaps we get "bleedover" from a parallel state where things are unfolding almost the same, and maybe it's like getting a radio signal a fraction of a second early. In that timeline, the FedEx truck did arrive 10 seconds earlier... and somehow we "receive" that potential, whether by error or by design.
I also can't explain how my wife is a "psychic" (an often reviled term in the scientific community) but I know from observation that she IS "something." As does both the Los Angeles PD and US Federal law enforcement, who have had her on retainer as a "consultant."
The pedestrians vs airplane observer example... nice; and now I have some additional ideas to ponder.
Thanks, as always, for a meaningful comment!
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wow this is nicely said.. I really had to read it twice ( lack of not native english maybe) But there is more then we know.. only a few % of our brains are known yet. Imagine what is more to discover.. but I guess that will be the benefit of later generations.. if we did not kill our earth and our selfs first...
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I experience Deja Vu somewhat often, and one scientific explanation is that it's just the brain going through your memories and misfiring, sort of like dreaming.. And.. I do think there might be a connection there to the dream world and this may be why some like yourself experience precognition.. I do think that perhaps the dreamstate is outside of our physical lineal time and that perhaps some people can go into the past and future so to speak and bring back information to the present, whether that is true or not I don't know.. but I have researched it a bit and I am very open to that possibility.. I dunno what Deju Vu is! But I wish I did! Good post. :)
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I have a feeling there's a scientific explanation for it all, but also that science simply hasn't "caught up" yet to the point where we have the tools and knowledge to actually observe and measure what's happening. Just like your smartphone would have been complete "magic" to someone in 1900, what might we know in the year 2100 that seems like a mystery today?
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A fascinating subject for sure. I have only had one or two experiences of this phenomenon but when I did have them they were very strong indeed. The strongest being regarding to the little village I live in today. When I first visited the village (in Norway) as a tourist, I felt an overwhelming sensation that I had been, even live there before, and that I had lived there for many years.
6 months later I had emigrated to this very village. That was 16 years ago.
It´s as though it had already happened and I had forgotten about it and then when I saw the place my memory returned.
Perhaps Einstein was right when he suggested that time was actually going backwards but our brains interpret it as going forwards.
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It is fascinating, to be sure.
Oddly enough, I had a similar experience with the town where I now live... 11 years ago, I was going to move from Texas to here in Washington state, but had no fixed destination. Looking at maps for likely candidates, I pointed at this town-- and, never having heard of it before-- pictured it in my head, down to the layout of the main part of town and the neighborhoods... and it's almost exactly how it looked, when I got here.
Indeed, Einstein may have been right... quantum mechanics remain mostly a mystery,
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Wow fantastic
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Now that I think about it I do get “Deja-vu” in form of writing and gaming.
Writing
I get this these types of feeling a lot when I write. I’m not sure if it’s because I have thought about certain topics while I dream (I don’t ever recall my dreams anymore) or if it’s something more.
Always a very strange feeling that often leads me to double checking google to make sure my bad memory is not just remembering something long ago that I have forgotten about a dozen times over.
Gaming
Also happens a lot in gaming which freaks me out quite a bit. Some times it happens because dev has copied or done something similar so I just think its been done before by me but it has not
Other times it’s like a game dev stole my thoughts while I was sleeping and made certain game levels or designs the way I would have. So it just feels like certain thing is would have done and thus a feeling of “deja-vu.”
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Some interesting examples @enjar... for me, the most striking tend to be dreams that "come to be." Since I keep a dream journal (have for 20 years) and record as much detail as possible at the time of the dream, it's very interesting to compare just how accurate these things can be... months and even years later.
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Dream hard. Winning lotto numbers!!!!!!!
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Well, from my own particular point of view. Being someone holding a healthy long term eidetic memory. Like I've already told you before. You would have to add to your pot of pondering and scientific examination of the deja-vu phenomenon, the fact that most of us, if not everyone. We are exposed EVERY microsecond to megazillions of stimuli and inputs usually overflowing our senses nonstop. Which, even subconsciously stored & .rar compressed integrally in some hidden corner of our brain, definitely are wiped out and conveniently forgotten from our conscious mind to avoid being overwhelmed by them. But nevertheless, they are indeed there, stored in some place at the reach of a spark of the slightest absentmindedness and distraction outta our attention apart from the events we are witnessing at a given present instant.
Therefore, in my opinion, there is no need to become too religious, esoteric or spiritual to try decipher and explain where those very vivid deja-vu experiences truly come from in our mundane daily life. Those experiences, hunches, perceptions and sensations of repetitive situations and things, affirmatively have been seen, heard, smelled, tasted, felt and happened to us before and are deeply embedded in the core of our inner self. Somewhere in the nodes and connections of those synapses that were built inadvertently and for the same reason not consciously registered and conveniently forgotten. Hence, we are unaware NOW at the present moment that they already previously existed. And we end up thinking that events unfolding before our eyes and in front of our noses at a given moment in the present are brand new. But in fact, they are not. :)
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That's certainly one of the angles I've considered... our conscious awareness tracks somewhere between 8-20 stimuli... but there are 1000's "going in" and they end up somewhere. And I suppose that storage can be triggered by a similar (or almost the same) event, situation, or place coming up again.
One of the things that makes this all doubly interesting is that I have kept a very detailed dream journal for 20-something years... and I have it "written down as hard copy" when something happens and I know I dreamt it. Many times, these recollections are of details that go well beyond random chance.
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Yes indeed. That's exactly how our brain works. It functions like an everlastingly dry sponge always ready and willing to absorb everything and get soaked with absolutely every bit of stimuli happening around us. Even without us noticing it.
Yup! through dream states, when our brain is really in calm and our mind in rest. Those are specifically the brief instants and our best chance to unconsciously find the keywords to unzip the data and bring in the light of a semi intermediate state of consciousness all those events and experiences that were stored with a password by our brains on their own, during our waking state without us having noticed before. If you have had the chance to have these "written down as hard copy" so that they can be reviewed and examined afterward in a state of full consciousness. that explains to a large extent the high coherence, eloquence and rationality of your personality that is consistently displayed and shared in your posts. :)
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Check this out. Jordan Peterson sort of talks about this in his lectures. They're long but well worth the time. You figure we've all got generation after generation of biological evolution in us as well as psychological. He focuses on the biblical stories but in the process explains exactly what you question here. The realm between the known & unknown...:) we have memories from our fathers.
https://steemit.com/jordan-peterson/@julzee/jordan-peterson-on-the-psychological-significance-of-the-stories-in-the-bible
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I expect the time will come where we will understand that there are scientific and "spiritual" explanations for things that actually co-exist, side by side. At MIT, they have now been studying genetic memory for a while... attempting to explain (as an example) why someone might have an irrational fear of large dogs... and it tracking to their parent having been almost killed by a large dog, and the fear passing along somehow imprinted on DNA.
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Your post reminded me a book I read a long time ago that was fascinating. There is a condition called "temperal lobe epilepsy" where people who have it suffer from frequent deja-vu moments as a result of seizures (sometimes small and unnoticeable). The author of the book theorized that Leonardo Da Vinci had this condition and that it influenced his creativity. My brother complained of having deja-vu moments and I am convinced he has this condition.
Deja-vu is such an interesting subject. You could talk about parallel universes or time being a circle where you relive the same moments over and over and sometimes sense it. I don't know what to make of them. Maybe it is just something misfiring in the brain or maybe something more mysterious.
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Whatever it is, I expect we'll be able to explain it through a scientific approach, in another 100 years, just like we today can explain what was "a mystery" 100 years in the past.
I'm going to have to study up more on temporal lobe epilepsy... this stuff fascinates me.
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Best book about it is "Seized: Temporal Lobe Epilepsy as a Medical, Historical, and Artistic Phenomenon" by Eve LaPlante. It really is interesting stuff. And I screwed up. I was van Gogh not Da Vinci that had it. Been a while since I read up on it.
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No worries... I'll check out the book though... sounds interesting.
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in my adolescence it was more common to have these visions, I even happened several times a week, coincidentally with my children the same thing happens, they experience it often, I now as an adult is not so frequent, I do not want to contribute.
excellent post dear friend @ denmarkguy congratulations on the topic addressed, is of much interez.
I wish you a beautiful and prosperous week
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Thanks @ jlufer-- I haven't thought so much about how frequently this happens, but it seems almost like it has happened more after age 40 or so.
Have a beautiful week, as well!
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For me there is a correlation between deja-vu's and dreams. I'm certain that the deja-vu I have had in my life, have something to do with what I have been dreaming about.
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Interesting observation... and that does make the whole thing a little more complicated. I have had-- for what it's worth-- a number of what could best be described as "prophetic" dreams. In most cases, people would call it wishful thinking and "psychological filling," but the thing is that I have been keeping a very detailed dream journal for almost 20 years (got in the habit while in therapy, never stopped)... so I have these events written down as "hard copy," not just as vague memories.
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A thought-provoking post. I believe it may be more precognition. I have had experiences where it could be nothing more than precognition and not a "memory-glitch". It can be downright freaky when it happens...
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Yes, it can be a little unnerving when it happens... especially when you can also predict what's going to happen in the next few seconds.
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The feeling "I saw it before" at that moment you think how to handle, because you know the outcome. Then you have to take back that memory and "play" that situation in your head. At that moment you do not know how you know it,. and where it came from ,... It happens indeed.
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It definitely does happen... and for me, it happens often enough that I have gotten more interested in the underlying "mechanics" of it.
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Actually we should write down more dreams, dreams we remember in the morning. Could be very interesting,...
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The best explanation that I have read about it that time travels in the cycle so it repeats itself after a while and so we say that this has happened in the past with me. Even some scientific theories prove it.
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Some of it, I am sure, is cyclical... I'm also inclined to believe there are multiple explanations, or multiple kinds of ways these things occur.
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Deja vu for me is confirmation from the ALL that I am on the right track with what I am doing. As above, so below.
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I like that... certainly a positive way to look at it!
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