The Déjà Vu Effect

Prologue

On our quest to find our dreams somewhere in reality
We find ourselves in mysteries
Bound on cross-roads of doubt
To beget the facts of science
Or to beget that of the preacher man.

How helpless our Story
As intermittent transient software bugs
In a system insanely complex as we are
Both likely and very hard to debug
Ghosts in a shell- you may say
Ghost in a shell-we are!

Humanity has, through the years, grown so intelligent and sophisticated that we are able to build skyscrapers, go to the moon, accurately diagnose diseases, communicate with others in real time over thousands of miles apart.  The only thing waiting to be revealed is the deep and mysterious areas of the brain.
One among the mysteries is Déjà Vu.

It happens that you'll be at a place or probably doing something.... Then suddenly, a thought struck you. At that instant, your brain tries  to communicate ...!
"Hey dude, seems something is awkward here...."
"Errrm yeah, something is off. Have we been here before?"
"Yeaaah, seems so.........." But...but but....then everything fades like smoke in  thin air.

-DÉJÀ VU! Is a French word which means "seen before".
It is a sense of familiarity that can occur at any point in time, giving a strong feeling that it has already been experienced before or in the past days

Down through the years, there has been too many theories and explanations which have been put forward. To make things even more complicated, it depends on which form of 'deja' experience you are wishing to explain
be it event-related, location-related, epilepsy-related, brief, extended, rare, frequent, and so on. Which theory you favour also tends to depend on which field of study you are interested in: psychology,  parapsychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis,  or theology.

Many parapsychologists believe it is related to a past-life experience. Obviously, there is more investigation to be done.

However, Robert Efron of Boston's Veterans Hospital in 1963 proposed that déjà vu is as a result of dual neurological processing caused by delayed signals in the brain. Efron found that the brain’s sorting of incoming signals is done in the temporal lobe of the brain's left hemisphere. However, signals enter the temporal lobe twice before processing, once from each hemisphere of the brain, normally with a slight delay of milliseconds between them. Efron proposed that if the two signals were occasionally not synchronized properly then they would be processed as two separate experiences, with the second seeming to be a re-living of the first.

The interesting fact is, there is an opposite effect to this too, which is called Jamais vu, which is the state in which a situation, quite known and well experienced by a person, might seem completely new to him. There is a short experiment for experimenting this. Take a small word, such as brush, or net or door and write it around 30 times within a minute.

Your mind becomes so accustomed to the sound and formation of the word that it actually skips the relation between the word and the object, after that you'll feel doubtful whether the word is an actual word related to an object or just something you wrote haphazardly. It is really interesting, and shows how our mind relates everything together.

Interesting stuff? Share with us your experience of déjà vu and what you personally believe in the comment section. Thank you.

By: Stevenson Ohene-Gyan Ankomah