Deja Who? Deja Vu!

As I was surfing the web tonight, I found a V-Sauce video on the psychological phenomenon on deja vu. Deja vu can be described as moments that, when we are in them, feel like they have happened before. It feels like you are in the exact same situation or moment from a past experience. To me, like Michael from V-Sauce, deja vu is similar to hypnosis. We don't have any provable information on how it really occurs.

People don't even have the ability to experience deja vu until they are 8 or 9 years old, and it only continues through maybe your early to middle twenties. Because of this, we can infer that deja vu is related to brain development. Michael explains to us that one of the number one causes of deja vu is that disconnection between the unconscious and conscious awareness of processing the stimuli entering the brain. He explains this through visual processing. From earlier units we know that the light waves enter through the eyes, and make their way back to the visual cortex, in the occipital lobe to be processed into an image. We also know that people who have damage to their occipital love are blind because they can't process any images. But, Michael brings another bit of information to our attention. While the lightwaves make their way from the retina to the occipital lobe, they make many stops along the way. One for example being the somewhere in the limbic system. This would give emotional meaning to the image someone is seeing or not seeing. People who only have damage to the occipital lobe can see the light waves and process emotion through them because of the passing through the limbic system. Just like the visual information, the memory associated with deja vu could stop in the limbic system and trigger emotions from the very place you are in, making you feel as though you are in the exact same position.

There could also be a biologic predisposition to deja vu. Michael explains this as random epileptic seizures of neurons in the brain. He then goes on to tell us that people who have deja vu very often, usually have some damage in their temporal lobes. These epileptic events are triggered in the temporal lobe, and they also explain hypnogogic jerk. The idea that when you are in stage one of sleep, you feel as though you may be falling or floating.

While that is what we know about deja vu for know, there are also presque vu, and jamais vu. Presque vu is when something is on "the tip of your tongue," but for the life of you, you cannot remember it. Jamais vu is when you say something over and over again and it suddenly starts to lose meaning and seems like a whole new word.

I think what makes all these "vu's" so interesting is that there is not anyone piece of provable evidence that we can use to confirm what deja vu is. It shall remain a mystery for now!