Déjà Vu: Your Mysterious Message From The Stars
Oh, Déjà vu. You've felt it, I’ve felt it. It's that feeling that comes over you at random, like you've just found a glitch in the matrix or someone has seriously screwed up the production of your very own Truman Show. When you're talking to a friend and you get the feeling, if only for a brief second, that you have done this all before. It’s the instinctual sense that you were wearing this same outfit, in this same place, at this same time of day, even having this exact same conversation, but the memory looms just out of reach in the hazy suburbs of your mind.
Déjà vu means “already seen” in French - an accurate description of the uncanny sensation. At first, it was believed to be a thing of supernatural quality. The first record of the term’s use was by French philosopher and parapsychologist Émile Boirac in 1876, who believed it was a glimpse into a past life. In the 19th century, parapsychologists researched and theorized about things just outside of human understanding, like hypnosis, telepathy, and clairvoyance. It’s what we, today, would call a major pseudoscience. However, in a time before modern science, it was used to explain the unexplainable. More contemporary psychologists have tried their hand to understand it too; Sigmund Freud claimed it was an expression of repressed memories (classic Siggy) and Carl Jung believed it resulted from tapping into a collective consciousness shared by all humans. Both of these theories have been debunked, but this mysterious human phenomenon still refuses to be defined, even by modern science.
Scientists at many major research institutes have done their best to find the true answer to this mystifying experience. Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to test due to its sporadic nature. It would require a human subject to be confined to a laboratory, hooked up to hundreds of wires, for as long as it takes until they experience déjà vu. How unethical is that? Instead, they have resigned to linking it to memory and calling it a day. The most in-depth research done on the topic was with epilepsy patients. Many claimed to have experienced déjà vu right before a temporal lobe seizure (where memory is stored in the brain). While this is a start, there is still no scientifically accepted answer as to why this happens to healthy individuals. What we do know: Déjà vu episodes most frequently happen to those in late adolescence and taper off as we age. It’s also more common in those who are highly stressed or sleep deprived. This debunks the theories claiming it stems from age-induced memory loss or repression. The bottom line, though, is that we still don't know exactly why or how déjà vu happens. Maybe we never will.
I’ve always taken comfort in the sensation of déjà vu. If you can stomach the disorientation, it can be almost magical. My grandmother always told me that déjà vu is a sign that you are on the right track - like a check-in meeting with the universe. For that one precious moment, you have slipped through the fabric of time and landed right where you need to be. And hey, as a twenty-year-old with what feels like no plans or direction, I’ll take any cosmic advice I can get.
