Déjà vu -"The creepy feel"

Have you ever felt like you have already been to this place before,though you are visiting it for the first time? Similarly, meeting the person for the first time but feel you know him/her before? If yes...Cool...(hi5 :P )... Am not alone...I get this feel many a time!  I will have this eerie feel that I have  relived the entire situation that's happening now, already! I know it sounds weird, funny, terrified, spooky...Whatever you term it ! But its true...Initially I thought I had some special magic powers and that so called ESP power :P

During my schooling I came across this word Déjà vu... That was the time when I was in a quest of finding new words to use in my daily vocabulary in school...So this new word interested me and immediately I started learning more about it! I just got to know that it is a french word meaning "already seen"...
When I read more about it recently, I found it very very interesting!!! Déjà vu in simpler terms can be interpreted as "been there, done that" feel...It is defined as "familiarity without awareness"! Arthur Funkhouser, describes about 3 types of déjà vu in Perspective-A Mental Health Magazine...

•  Déjà vecu(Already experienced) - It is the most common of all the types...It is the sensation of having done something, being in an identical situation and knowing what happens next!
• Déjà senti(Already felt) - It is rare... It is a feel of experiencing sensations like smell, taste etc.
• Déjà visité(Already visited)- Feel of being in the same place before.

I also found a reasonable scientific explanation for this kind of feeling. One possibility is simply the occasional mismatch made by the brain in its continuous attempt to create whole sensical pictures out of very small pieces of information.Another explanation for déjà vu is that there is a slight malfunctioning between the long and short-term memory circuits of the brain.When the new, recent piece of information is drawn upon, the person thinks that the piece is coming from long-term storage and so must have come from the distant past.A similar theory says that the error is in the timing of the perceptive and cognitive processes. Sensory information is rerouted on its way to memory storage and, so, is not immediately perceived. This short delay causes the sensation of experiencing and remembering something at the same time, a very unsettling feeling.

But the psychoanalysts have a different take on this. They feel that it is a manifestation of wish fulfillment..déjà vu is the subconscious repetition of a past experience, but with a more positive ending. I found that they link it to the other debatable topic, past life. They feel it gives a sneak peek into our past life.Most scientists scoff at these "magical" explanations for neurological events, citing that they break many of the laws of nature. Some, however, point to more recent findings in physics, such as the possibility of particles that can travel backwards in time (tachyons), time loops and multiple universes. They say that these may give cause for more non-traditional ways of seeing causality and for the possibility of neurological "time travel".
Déjà vu, the more you read about it, the more unclear it becomes!I have feel of Déjà vecu right now...of having written this blog already ;)


PS: Learnt about it from various sources....Would require a separate blog to list out all the sources ;)