Ever met a person for the first time, but had the sense you'd met them before? If you've experienced deja vu, you know the spooky feeling that comes with it. How does science explain a deja vu? DW's Aparnaramm reports. ⬇️
Wait, have I met you before? Ah! Have I been here before? Also, sorry if you think you've read this before. It must be deja vu.
But intellectuals have tried to explain the phenomenon as far back as Plato, who saw it as evidence of past lives. More recently, Sigmund Freud described this as a"recollection of unconscious fantasy coupled with a desire to improve the present situation." Carl Jung thought it was related to the collective unconscious, while modern Hollywood describes it as a ‘glitch in the matrix'.
Around 90 percent of the population has experienced deja vu and the frequency of it decreases as we age. "Our brain basically works like a time and space machine," Giordano told DW. "It takes everything in our present and relates it to something similar or dissimilar in our past. This way, it will be able to essentially plan the future. But there's a possibility that these signals could get mixed up.
It’s also difficult for researchers to reach a conclusion, as deja vu is a difficult phenomenon to reproduce in a laboratory setting. "It is difficult to study because it happens spontaneously. We don't know how to trigger the episodes in a lab," said Spears.
There are also studies linking deja vu with a parallel universe. Theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku believes that deja vu is a form of memory glitch that happens when"fragments of memories stored in the brain… are elicited by moving into an environment that resembles something we’ve already experienced."
Spears added that highly educated people tend to get deja vu more often than less educated people."People who travel a lot, who remember their dreams and people who hold liberal beliefs can more often experience it," he said. "Not at all," said Giordano. Deja vu happens to healthy people all the time, and is most common between the ages of 15 and 25.