• Question: How can anyone explain déjà vu? What's your opinion on this?

    Asked by to Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sam, Sarah on 18 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Nate Bastian

      Nate Bastian answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      Deja vu happens due to the way that the brain processes sensory information. Every second we receive a huge amount of sensory information (i.e., what we see, hear, taste, feel, etc, but also do you feel ill, is your heart working well, is your stomach digesting, do you need to go to the bathroom, etc) that you simply can’t process in your consciousness, because it’s too much. So basically, the subconscious part of your brain filters through the information and passes the important bits to your consciousness. However, sometimes, some sensory information passes to your consciousness before the full picture is ready. This leads to a strong sense of “familiarity”, i.e. that you have experienced this before.

    • Photo: Sam Connolly

      Sam Connolly answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      I’m not sure anyone knows for sure, but I think most people think it’s to do with your brain playing tricks on you! It’s probably either a bit of a delay between different bits of your brain getting the information you see, so it seems like you say it twice, or just you actually have been in a very similar situation and you’re brain makes you think it was actually the same situation. Either that or it’s a glitch in the matrix.

    • Photo: Sarah Casewell

      Sarah Casewell answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      It’s your brain playing tricks on you! Sometimes the brain takes shortcuts and tells us what it thinks should be happening instead of what is (there are all sorts of optical illusions you can do to look at this).
      Your brain processes what it sees, but doesn’t quite get it all right and you have a feeling of things being familiar or that you’ve seen/done it before.

    • Photo: Natasha Stephen

      Natasha Stephen answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      I agree, it’s the brain catching up with itself and therefore accidentally playing a trick on you.

      It’s a weird one though, some people can actually realise that they are experiencing deja vu during the event and are therefore able to actually talk about what is going to happen as it does! I guess this is slightly different to the traditional deja vu but interesting nonetheless!

    • Photo: Roberto Trotta

      Roberto Trotta answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      That’s a very puzzling phenomenon! But then we know very little about how our brain works, so perhaps one day we’ll have understood enough to explain it. For now, I think it is something that feels real, but it does not mean that you have actually premonition powers, for example — it might just be some wires getting crossed in your brain and tricking you into believing that you have lived through that situation before — a bit like mirage.

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