Why do I have the feeling that I have experienced this before.

Surely you have also noticed that strange sensation in the middle of a conversation, when arriving at a new place or taking a walk and suddenly thinking: “I have already lived this”. Although you are fully aware that this cannot be the case, that feeling invades you and strangeness overwhelms you.

Since it is something very subjective, it is very difficult to analyse why this happens to us, it cannot be recreated in a laboratory and that is why it is one of the great mysteries that our minds keep, or at least it was now.

Have you had a déjà vu?

When we have this sensation of experiencing something that we have previously experienced, we speak of déjà vu, which in French means “already lived”. Although this sensation is very vivid, it is impossible for us to remember when we lived it or why it seems so familiar, being an experience that lasts for a few seconds.

This fact is not something new, in the literature of all times we can find descriptions and narrations that speak of this feeling of reliving the same scene, writers such as Dickens or Proust have novelized déjà vu, in parallel, for decades the Scientists try to find an explanation that goes beyond the paranormal and magical theories.

From these studies we have learned that up to 60% of people are capable of experiencing it, arising from the age of 8 and being more common until the age of 25, especially when under pressure or stressed.

What science says

Although it has been popularly spread that déjà vu is the memory of a dream and there are even people who believe that it is the memory of another life or something that will happen in the future, science has been able to clarify what is happening in our brain when do we suffer this feeling. Here we will explain some of the theories about déjà vu that have gained more force:

Between short and long term memory

All the studies that have been done today agree on the same point and that is that this phenomenon is due to a psychic anomaly and not to paranormal experiences. Something that reaffirms this thesis is that déjà vu are very common in patients suffering from epilepsy, something that relates them to excessive activity in the temporal lobe of the brain, where memory and sensory perception are located.

One of the prevailing theses is that there is an overlap between short-term memory and long-term memory, that is, we store something that we have just perceived as long-term memory, which causes that, for a few moments, we believe that this This situation belongs to the past when we really just experienced it for the first time.

Between the conscious and the unconscious

However, the one that perhaps has more acceptance among the scientific community is the one that we will explain below and that, in part, has something to do with the one we have just seen.

This theory believes that the feeling of having experienced something before is due to a delay in the optical path. Our eye perceives an image, but between the thousandths of a second it takes for this organ to send that stimulus to the brain, our unconscious has already stored the image, as when our brain analyses it we are unable to remember the origin of our memory, it causes us that feeling of having lived it before.

A more everyday explanation would be to visit a city that has been seen in a film, but is not present, when witnessing it live we will notice that familiarity but we will be unaware of remembering why.

What if the opposite happened to you?

Most people have experienced déjà vu, so it is a fairly well-known and popular term, something that many people are not aware of is the phenomenon of jamais vu, that is, the opposite.

The jamais vu is a paramnesia whereby the person who feels it feels like strange or unreal places and situations that are actually familiar to them, something that although it may seem strange happens to up to 60% of the population, strange, right??

Although it may seem strange to you, surely you have experienced it, for example, when you repeat the same word many times until at the end it loses its meaning and becomes a strange sound that has nothing to do with the original word. It is also common in the world of music, when suddenly a score that has been worked on for months is forgotten, you can even find objects and landscapes, if you stare at each other for a long time to the point that it begins to seem strange.

The scientific explanation for this phenomenon is found in the way the brain analyses the stimuli it receives. When we repeat a word, look at a landscape, or focus on something for a long time, our brain gets tired and stops looking for meaning, so that suddenly seems unreal or strange.

These investigations can be very useful, since it is believed that the same mechanism that produces jamais vu, functioning abnormally, is the one that causes some mental disorders such as schizophrenia, remaining chronically in the affected person.

What if the opposite happened to you?

Most people have experienced déjà vu, so it is a fairly well-known and popular term, something that many people are not aware of is the phenomenon of jamais vu, that is, the opposite.

The jamais vu is a paramnesia whereby the person who feels it feels like strange or unreal places and situations that are actually familiar to them, something that although it may seem strange happens to up to 60% of the population, strange, right??

Although it may seem strange to you, surely you have experienced it, for example, when you repeat the same word many times until at the end it loses its meaning and becomes a strange sound that has nothing to do with the original word. It is also common in the world of music, when suddenly a score that has been worked on for months is forgotten, you can even find objects and landscapes, if you stare at each other for a long time to the point that it begins to seem strange.

The scientific explanation for this phenomenon is found in the way the brain analyses the stimuli it receives. When we repeat a word, look at a landscape, or focus on something for a long time, our brain gets tired and stops looking for meaning, so that suddenly seems unreal or strange.

These investigations can be very useful, since it is believed that the same mechanism that produces jamais vu, functioning abnormally, is the one that causes some mental disorders such as schizophrenia, remaining chronically in the affected person.