What about déjà vu?

Thanks to Iridescentforever for this subject. Check out The Arrow's great books: Stay, The Game Changer, Fallen for the Devil; Everything I want; and Same Love.

Déjà vu is a French expression that means 'already seen'. This expression is bantered around quite a bit in the media, but how did it come about and what does it really mean?

The idea is really a subject for Parapsychology, or the study of strange phenomenon that can't be explained scientifically, and it goes back at least to 1928. Literally, déjà vu means that you would have a strong recognition of a location that you've never seen or been to. How is that possible? Well, it seems that psychologists believe that it's the product of a false perception or a misguided sense of familiarity. They attribute it to mental disorders like schizophrenia, a mental disease that makes people have a distorted view of reality, and anxiety. I could see how schizophrenia would produce a feeling of déjà vu. People with this devastating mental disorder see things that don't exist and imagine things that aren't true. In other words, it's all in their heads.

Despite all of this, there are some logical explanations for this phenomenon. The one that I like is dreams. During dreaming, we conjure up all sorts of images that seem to be a conglomeration of many of our daily experiences. It's possible that this could produce a sense of having been to a location that we've never visited. Remember that dreams are also the result of our brain remembering scenes from TV, movies and even books. We see things that are vaguely familiar because they are the result of the mental construction of bits and pieces of our memories. Many people who have a bout with déjà vu often can't recall the specifics of what they were doing or why they were at a previously visited location. This could result from a problem with the brain's memory system.

One cannot dismiss the effects of drugs on this phenomenon. There are many drugs for anxiety and depression that involve altering brain chemistry, and let's not forget Marijuana, Cocaine, LSD, and a host of other mind altering drugs used for recreational purposes. These things often produce the same effect that Virtual Reality does. However, Virtual Reality is a modern concept and would not be involved in previous incidences of déjà vu.

Maybe this phenomenon is the result of information stored in our brain coming to the forefront. Psychologists call this cryptomnesia. This explanation is based on the idea that memory is not just a recall of information but also a reconstruction of stored memory data. This would be a Left Brain function.
Did you know that there is an opposite phenomenon? It's called Jamals vu. It's where you can't recognize a place or location you've been to before. I think that's just dementia.

Déjà vu has been used in media. A movie with this title in 2008 stared Denzel Washington, Paula Patton and Jim Caviezel. It's also the name of a strip club in Los Angeles. There you go; Déjà vu has been prostituted!

Thanks for reading.