Blog Post 1: What is Déjà vu?

Our mind is a wonderful thing – there is so much about it which remains a mystery to this day.There are a lot of marvelous and mysterious world inside our heads. Our brain, which controls everything in our body and communicates with thousands of other brain cells, has also the ability to experience some other kind of phenomenon. Science is able to describe these strange phenomena, but it cannot account for their origins. Have you experienced something like while you are chatting with your friends or exploring a place you've never been, and  suddenly a feeling washes over you - you've experienced this exact moment before. But the powerful feeling comes over you of familiarity, you have been here before or done this before, believing that this has genuinely happened before.  But you know that it hasn't happened and that it shouldn't feel this way. So it feels weird, wrong, and inappropriate.Many people experience this odd sensation. Because of their increase in number, déjà vu should really be explained in any means for the mere understanding of people. With this, this article can answer the question “What really happens when moments in our lives seem to repeat themselves?”  I was browsing the internet when I read the article “Explainer: what is déjà vu and why does it happen? “byAmy Reichelt, and  "Have We Met Before? Scientists ShowWhy the Brain Has the Answer" I found out that this phenomenon was poorly understood in scientific terms. Déjà vu comes from the French word that means “already seen”. The phenomenon is very complex, and there are many different theories as to why déjà vu happens.
Déjà vu has many possible causes. As much as 70 percent of the population had experienced some form of déjà vu. A higher number of incidents occur in people 15 to 25 years old than in any other age group. According to Sigmund Freud he, believe that these feelings are the dreams that we have every night, however we don’t remember them. Many scientific estimation and studies actually hold this true. They say that study of “paramnesia” is referred to the dreams that are of past experiences, while others perceive them as “remembering the future” since they happen before the actual ‘déjà vu’ moment takes place.
Others said that the phenomenon is a memory-based experience and assume the memory centers of the brain are responsible for it. Remembering requires two things to happen in our brain, first is the region responsible for memory data, the “temporal lobes” It is important in the detection of familiarity, or recognition, as opposed to the detailed recollection of specific events. Then next, the region that handles the short and long term memory namely the “hippocampus” that is inside the temporal lobes that recall the things that happen before and pulls up back that memory.Usually, this two process; the familiarity and recall work really good together, the brain register first the familiarity before it recalls the memory but sometimes it get a little bit out of control. This dysfunctional process is called “déjà vu” our brains sometimes familiarize and recall at the same time.

 There is much speculation as to how and why this phenomenon happens. Several psychoanalysts attribute déjà vu to simple fantasy or wish fulfillment, while some psychiatrists ascribe it to a mismatching in the brain that causes the brain to mistake the present for the past. Many parapsychologists believe it is related to a past-life experience. Obviously, there is more investigation to be done.

After reading many articles about déjà vu, I found it more interesting and I was motivated to research more about it.