ABOUT FACTS NET Mysterious

Deja vu, we have all heard these words and know that this is the illusion of having experienced something already that is happening for the first time. There are many theories out there that tell us why we feel this way, some even say that it is a process of our brains that is not yet understood. Other theories state that we pass through some sort of gateway and are experiencing some form of interdimensional flux, holy Startrek! The funny thing about deja vu or deja vous, as some people call it, is that most of us have experienced it. Supposedly, there are three types of deja vu, they are: deja vecu, deja senti and deja visite. Deja vecu is already experienced, deja senti is already felt and deja visite is already visited.

We know that some deja vu is not deja vu at all, it is merely seeing something that we have seen before, but forgotten. A good example of this is when you go to the movies. Sometimes they will show you a "coming soon" trailer of a movie that doesn't come out for a year. By the time the movie is released, you may have forgotten you saw the trailer, yet when you seen the movie you feel that some of the scenes look very familiar and you feel like you saw them before, because YOU DID. Another example of this might be a story someone told you many years ago and was long forgotten, yet when a similar story is told you, you feel like you heard this before. We read, hear and view things that we think we have forgotten but somehow, they remain in the back of our minds just waiting to pop out the first chance they get. Some researchers think that they have the answer to deja vu, they state that it is caused when signals move too slowly down our secondary pathways. Some people, thank goodness it is only a few for their sake, have to take medicine to try and suppress strong feelings of deja vu that they constantly have.

Some scientists state the deja vu occurs when two cognitive processes get out of sync, this is called the dual processing theory. There is another theory that is pretty interesting. It states that our brain takes in a scene without us realizing it. We then purposely take in the same scene and we feel that we have seen it before, even if there has only been a second between the unconscious view and the conscious one. Other scientists state that chronic or frequent deja vu is a form of epilepsy. Then there are those that state the reason we have deja vu is that we somehow are experiencing something that happened to us in a parallel universe.

Could deja vu be caused by seeing what someone else saw and thinking this memory is our own?

There is another experience called jamais vu. This is the exact opposite of deja vu. Jamais vu is when you feel that you have never seen or heard something that should be very familiar to you. Science thinks this is caused because of long term memory problems. Sometimes epileptic seizures involve jamais vu.

So far I have only talked about common place deja vu experiences, but there are those experiences that are not so easily explained away and many of these experiences lead people to believe in previous lives for lack of a better understanding of what has happened to them.

A strange form of deja vu involves children. There are some documented cases of children, that are very young but knowing how to speak, talking about people and past lives. Sometimes these facts are verified. No one has been able to explain this satisfactorily. A little girl who was just about two years old, started speaking her first full sentences. Her mother was astounded to hear the girl say that she was now someone else and was going to take her vows as a nun. She went on to describe her duties in the convent including night prays. Later she talked about her death. Creepy, isn't it?

There is a man who gets overwhelming feelings of deja vu when he visits the home of Thomas Edison. He said it is because he now believes that he is Thomas Edison reincarnated. He bases his beliefs on the life he has lived which is very similar to the great inventor. There are many parallels. Is he really experiencing deja vu or does he only think that he is?

So do deja vu experiences really exist? Yes they do. Are they related to things like reincarnation? Probably not, but some people believe they are. Chances are that deja vu and all its branches are just some common occurrence caused by means unknown, in our brains.