Déjà Vu: Brain glitch or distant memory from some other life?
Déjà Vu: Brain glitch or distant memory from some other life?

I remember one day, in class, something unusual happened with me for the first time. That day, a new teacher was taking our class for the first time and the class was going as usual. And then suddenly I felt a sense of familiarity like I had experienced this exact moment before. Her voice, the color of her hijab and even the way she was taking the class felt familiar. It was not a vivid sensation but it was strong enough to make me feel like I had lived this reality before.
But the strange part was that it was her first class. So, there is no way I could have lived this reality before.
Have you ever felt something like that? Like you were reliving a reality from your own life even though you know there is no way this happened before?
This odd sensation is called déjà vu.
What is déjà vu?
The term déjà vu is a French term that means “already seen”. It describes an experience of a feeling like something happening now has already happened before. This phenomenon is surprisingly common. Studies have shown that around 60 to 80% of people experience it at least once in their life. It often starts happening suddenly, lasts only a few seconds and leaves you feeling confused.
But why does déjà vu happen? There are some notions like déjà vu happens as we have actually experienced the event in some parallel universe or experienced the same thing in some previous life.
There are no solid explanations as to why it happens but scientists and psychologists have been trying to understand what causes déjà vu for years now. And they have stumbled upon some interesting theories.
The brain glitch theory
One of the weird theory is that déjà vu is caused by a sort of glitch in the brains memory system. Our memory is usually divided into two parts. One part deals with the familiarity meaning recognising something similar and another part deals with recollection of specific details. These two parts normally work smoothly together. But sometimes they might not and that would trigger a glitch in the memory system. The brain would trigger itself making us feel like remembering something even though there is no actual memory backing it up.
The signal delay theory
Another theory related to the way our brain process information. In simple words, everything we experience, what we see, hear, touch is sent to our brain in signals. If, for some reason, the signal is delayed from one of the organs, even just for a fraction of a second compared to the other, the brain will process this same event twice. This time the process will feel familiar because it was just processed before.
Now this theory feels a little scientific and logical.
Dream and subconscious theory
There are also ideas that connect déjà vu to our dreams. Some researcher believe that we might have dreamt about a similar situation before and do not remember it consciously. Then, when something similar happens in real life, we feel as if this has happened before. Our brain connects that forgotten dream with the reality.
Others think it might be linked to things we have learned or seen but do not remember directly. This is called implicit memory. For example, we might have seen a similar situation or object before in our life but do not have the memory of it. However, our brain does remember it subconsciously and when we see something similar in present, we get the feeling of déjà vu.
This theory could be plausible.
Anyway, even though science has come a long way, déjà vu still feels a bit magical when it happens. There is something beautifully mysterious about how our mind shows us familiar things in unfamiliar moments. Sometimes I wonder, how curious and bewildering time, memory and our brain are.
Or maybe we really have lived the moments before. Who knows?