Kimaya Khurana - Week 13 - A Memory Which Never Happened
You’ve most likely felt that you’ve lived in a situation before, even though it is pretty much impossible for that to have happened.
A conversation, a place, just the moment itself.
Sometimes you may even feel like it's been a fever dream.
What I'm describing is something that has most likely happened to pretty much everybody, because it has for sure happened to me, many more times than I can count.
Déjà vu (in my opinion) is one of the most interesting phenomena to occur to humans. It comes from French and quite literally means “already seen.”
It feels as if a situation is weirdly familiar, as if you may know what will happen next, or if this exact thing has already happened, but you can't put your finger on it.
What makes it even stranger is how convincing the feeling is. Logically, we know that it couldn't have happened before, but our brain insists that it has.
I wish it were dreams that were somehow connecting together. A way to predict the future by optimizing survival and happening unconsciously, by using past experiences to model possible future situations.
Although I wish this had a more interesting explanation with a phenomenon as good as aliens, it isn't.
Around 60 to 80% of people have experienced déjà vu at some point in their lives, and although it is extremely common, it still isn’t fully understood. It is merely either a memory processing delay, a similar memory trigger, or just temporal lobe activity.
It additionally can be described as a “hiccup” in neural processing, where it is a small disruption in how the brain is recalling information, triggered by fatigue, stress, or dopamine. It inaccurately perceives a situation as a memory, and is a “mismatch” for the familiarity and the feeling.
Our brains are constantly trying to make sense of the present by comparing it to the past, and sometimes they blur together. The feeling itself will still remain strange to me, and eerily realistic, of how a memory which never happened still feels so real.
Kimaya, the idea of déjà vu is something that wholeheartedly terrifies me. It makes no sense. It feels like there are memories implanted in my head that I have never experienced before. One thing I have seen that I thought was an interesting theory is the idea of déjà vu connecting back to memories from previous lives. Something that happens in this life connects back to what we were doing in our past lives. While I do not know if reincarnation is real, I think this is the theory I like the most. It makes me feel like I am part of some kind of a collective consciousness which I think would be extremely cool. I also think your idea of dreams warning us about the future would be incredible. I have a lot of questions about how dreams are formed and where they come from and I think this would be a wonderful explanation. Déjà vu also reminds me of the Mandela Effect where masses of people remember something that never existed; for example, great numbers of people recall the monocle on the monopoly logo, which has never existed. I have no idea how something like that would happen; it is like déjà vu mirrored in a large number of people. This really speaks to how much about the human brain we have yet to uncover; thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteHello Kimaya. I have myself experienced déjà vu and after reading your blog, I have a profound appreciation for our brain. Even through my countless encounters with this bizarre phenomenon, I never realized the helplessness of a human being. Our entire perception of this world is solely relied on a mass of our brain. As you said, déjà vu is when the brain makes a mistake in its processing, and even through that small mistake it has a decent impact. Whenever I felt déjà vu, I always thought that the confusion we feel being our brain saying, "did we make a mistake or something?"
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing!