#13. What is déjà vu?
Déjà vu in French means “previously seen”. A lot have had this strange sensation of perceiving current events as such that have already happened and have been experienced.
Some people believe, that it is a proof that we have lived past lives. Others believe that these are events that people have foreseen in their dreams or other altered states of consciousness.
But these are all explanations suitable for the average Buddhist gatherings and are far away from being provable with science. So what do scientists say? Well by now I am sure you know what they say.
They have carried out numerous studies on this matter with no definitive answers. The closest guess they have has somethings to do with corrupted memories, just like a corrupted file on your hard drive.
The theory is that a certain memory in the brain was not recorded properly and some information is lost.
At some point a person is experiencing something that has similarities with that corrupted memory. So the brains digs up that old memory to compare it to this new experience, and while reading it, it reaches that corrupted part and since it can not recollect any data from that portion it starts filling it with the new experience.
And that is how you get the feeling that you have experienced this before, at least in theory.
The fact that the brain really tends to fill gaps with familiar things while processing visual data and dreaming (we’ll get to that later on). And this has been designed into some of our attempts into creating artificial intelligence.
Google’s Deep Dream is doing just that, it is kind of fun to watch how a computer algorithm sees puppies in certain groups of pixels. However we can not be sure if the déjà vu is caused by this feature in our brain. Science has yet to provide an explanation backed with proof for this phenomenon. Wait… that is a déjà vu!
Good to read that, but i believe that the writer went a little bit hard on religion. Answers the writer talked about were not given by my religion. For example, the stars we think that we look at are not the stars but the light emitted by those stars and has just reached our sghit, is mentioned in my religion and was proved later by science. I am sure that real religions give the correct piece of information and real science have to prove them.