I (and I am sure many others) have had a sense of Dajavu many many times through out my life.
What is Dajuvu?
The way I always understood it was a sense of when something is happening to you, a feeling of famaliarity that this "something" has happened before.
I remember the first time that I had this "weird sensation". I was probably not more than 10 years old and I was walking down the street in my hometown of Wisconsin Rapids with a friend. I think we were either walking to the mall or walking back home from the mall. One of our teachers had just driven by...and I remember thinking to myself what my friend was going to say in a few seconds and how the whole experience was feeling like it had happened before and that I knew exactly what was going to happen in the next few minutes.....which by the way, it did! My friend said "Hey...that was Mrs. BuckBurger...our math teacher and that wasnt her husband in the drivers seat of her car!!" and though I was going to say that exact thing because I KNEW he WAS going to say it just then, I didnt...because I felt that I would sound stupid.
I have had that weird sensation many times and have always wondered what caused it. Well.....now I am a little closer to understanding it, thanks to an article I just read in the "Online New York Times". The article follows:
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September 14, 2004
Déjà Vu: If It All Seems Familiar, There May Be a Reason
By BENEDICT CAREY
Watching the summer's events unfold - war protests, an Olympics scoring scandal, numerous terror scares - some people may have felt that it was all very familiar, that they had somehow been through this before.
Yet psychologists say it is usually life's more mundane details - the click of a radiator, the play of the shadows on a tablecloth - that prompt that sudden and sometimes breathtaking sense of familiarity.
"The way the coffee cups were lined up on the table," said Gretchen Purcell, 24, a business consultant in the Washington area who felt this so strongly during a conference-call meeting last month that it made her laugh out loud. "The whole scene was so familiar I thought I knew what people were going to say before they said it. It was like I was in a movie I'd already seen."
French for just that ("already seen"), déjà vu is the sort of fleeting, intimate experience that reveals itself more readily to novelists than to researchers. As recently as the 1990's, social scientists doing population surveys asked about it in the same breath as they inquired about poltergeists and contact with the dead.
But new research on memory has opened a promising window on the phenomenon, providing both possible explanations for the sensation and novel ways to create and measure it.
"It has been either ignored or considered too spooky or flaky for many scientists to touch," said Dr. Alan Brown, a psychologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who reviews the history of the field in a new book, "The Déjà Vu Experience: Essays in Cognitive Psychology.''
"But it is real, and by bringing it into the lab we can at least begin to understand it."
In surveys, about two-thirds of adults report having had at least one déjà vu experience, and the odd sensation seems to occur most often in people with lively, frequently stimulated imaginations. People who travel a lot are more likely to report the experiences than homebodies, for instance, and those with college or advanced degrees report having it more often than others, perhaps because they have encountered its sweet strangeness in the literary accounts of Proust and Tolstoy - or are more likely to rent the movie "Groundhog Day." Rates seem to peak in young adulthood and to fall off gradually through retirement age, when, Dr. Brown suggests, many people live daily routines that really are familiar.
A century ago, when Freud's theories dominated the field of psychiatry, analysts cast déjà vu as evidence of unconscious conflict, the ego defending itself against upsetting erotic urges for a mother figure or other hidden desires. And for decades, doctors have reported that sensations of déjà vu occasionally precede the seizures suffered by people with epilepsy. Overactive circuits in the temporal lobe, which can cause seizures, may inappropriately stimulate regions of the brain involved in detecting familiarity, some doctors say.
But Dr. Brown and others argue that it is not necessary to invoke hidden conflicts or unusual brain conditions to explain many cases of déjà vu. Normal, healthy brain function suffices. For one thing, déjà vu appears to be more common when people are exhausted or stressed, conditions that are known to cloud short- and long-term memory (and that may also accompany jamais vu, the opposite experience of staring at familiar words or objects and having no recollection of them).
Psychologists have long known, too, that people register impressions and images well before they are aware of what they have seen. The brain sends visual signals through at least two circuits, which move from the retina through the brain to the visual cortex via different routes.
It is an exquisitely tuned system, but common experience suggests many ways its functioning might be thrown off. The classic example, from Dr. Edward Bradford Titchener, a founder of the field, is when a person is about to cross a busy street, glances both ways and then is distracted by a shop window display: "As you cross then, you think, 'Why, I crossed this street just now'; your nervous system has severed two phases of a single experience, and the latter appears as a repetition of the earlier."
But the point, psychologists who study memory say, is that people take in a rich banquet of information without noticing it, or noticing and simply forgetting where it came from. It is entirely possible to read an Anne Rice novel and years later, after having forgotten the book, find that a first visit to New Orleans seems like a glimpse into a former life. Or to see one of the bar scenes from the movie "L.A. Confidential" and later walk into the Formosa Cafe for the first time and catch your breath.
The familiarity can come from a variety of sources, some real and some not, said Dr. Kathleen McDermott, a colleague of Dr. Jacoby's at Washington University who studies memory.
"It's well known that even if you imagine something now that may not have happened in the past, it can create a feeling of familiarity if it does happen later on," she said, adding, "You don't need objective outside information to create these situations; you can do so internally, on your own."
Dr. Brown and Dr. Elizabeth Marsh, a psychologist at Duke University, are taking this principle a step further, trying to produce in the laboratory a feeling that is closer to the kind of unexplained familiarity people know in life - that of arriving in a place for the first time and finding it surreally familiar.
"The most likely thing we'll find is that déjà vu occurs for a variety of reasons, perhaps different in each person, or in different situations," he said. "We are just getting started, to work toward an understanding gradually."
Several people in e-mail contact with Dr. Brown say they experience déjà vu frequently, many times in a year. One of them, Suketu Naik, 26, a graduate student in Utah, has kept a diary of the sensations.
In one entry, Mr. Naik writes of attending a birthday party for a friend at a restaurant: "Everything, the conversation, the position of people, position of tables, plates were extraordinarily 'in place.' Most remarkable of all events. Very intense. Lasted for a long time. Which is odd - usually intensity and time are reciprocal. I could predict every single future event in this time period to utmost precision. Felt extraordinarily weird after this one. I sat there for the next minute to come back to reality."
But the evolving understanding of memory suggests he never really left.
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So now I understand a little more about this weird, often "spine tingling" experience. Hope everyone else who has ever had this sensation has learned a little more also.
That is it for tonight. Time for bed.
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