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It can be a place, a conversation, a particular moment – even though we have never experienced this situation before, it still seems familiar to us. Up to 90 percent of all people have had such a déjà vu (in German: “already seen”). But scientists are still puzzling over how this feeling arises. Therefore, there are currently about thirty different theories about the cause of this phenomenon.
One thing is certain: men and women experience déjà vu equally often. Travel enthusiasts experience this more often than couch potatoes – probably because they feed their memory with new images, sounds, smells and emotions more often.
Liberals have it more often than conservatives, younger people more often than older people, people with higher education more often than those with less education. And the more tired someone is, the more likely they are to experience déjà vu. In fact, there are even people who constantly have déjà vu, to whom every situation in their life already seems familiar – as if they were caught in an endless loop.
Subliminal stimuli can be the cause
Some researchers believe that déjà vu is based on real memories. Example 1: A girl bakes gingerbread with her mother every year at Christmas time. Many years later, she can hardly remember it, she walks through the Christmas market and experiences a déjà vu. The atmosphere and the smell bring back memories of the past. She has the feeling that she has experienced this situation exactly like this before.
Another explanation of déjà vu relies on the influence of the unconscious. Example 2: In a train station hall, a man wants to check the departure time of his train. As he raises his head to look at the scoreboard, his eyes fall on a woman standing beneath the board. The moment is so brief that he doesn’t consciously notice it. A few minutes later, he wants to get on the train, the woman lets him go first – and the man experiences déjà vu. Unconsciously, his brain processed the image of her and now recognized her.
Memory or fiction?
But what if the déjà vu is not based on a real experience? This is also within the realm of possibility. Parapsychologists, for example, consider déjà vu to be a clairvoyant dream; esotericists, on the other hand, see the phenomenon as a spontaneous memory of a previous life.
This may sound crazy – but science doesn’t know any better. Neurologists still suspect that the answer can be found somewhere in the depths of our brain. Here the hippocampus , a part of the temporal lobe, distinguishes between known and unknown sensory impressions. In a déjà vu situation, the theory goes, the chemistry is simply going crazy.
