An Explanation for Déjà Vu: an Article

By Timmy T

Déjà vu can be described as a phenomenon in which an individual has a recognition that he has already experienced his present situation. Déjà vu has baffled psychologists for years. The only logical explanation stems from incredibly rare mental disorders. For example, memory trace may lead to the sensation that a person in a situation has already experienced it in the past. Thus, encountering something that evokes the implicit associations of an experience or sensation that cannot be remembered may lead to déjà vu.

In an effort to reproduce the sensation experimentally, two doctors named Dr. Banister and Zangwill used hypnosis to give participants posthypnotic amnesia for material they had already seen. When this was later re-encountered, the restricted activation caused thereafter by the posthypnotic amnesia resulted in 3 of the 10 participants reporting what the authors termed "paramnesias".

A 2012 study that used virtual reality technology to study reported déjà vu experiences supported this idea. This virtual reality investigation suggested that similarity between a new scene's spatial layout and the layout of a previously experienced scene in memory (but which fails to be recalled) may contribute to the déjà vu experience.

Certain drugs increase the chances of déjà vu occurring in the user. Some pharmaceutical drugs, when taken together, have also been implicated in the cause of déjà vu. Two researchers, Taiminen and Jääskeläinen, reported the case of an otherwise healthy male who started experiencing intense and recurrent sensations of déjà vu upon taking the drugs amantadine and phenylpropanolamine.

Ultimately, Déjà vu still has not been researched enough to understand it entirely, therefore it remains a mystery.