The term déjà vu is French and means, literally, "already seen." Those who have experienced the feeling describe it as an overwhelming sense of familiarity with something that shouldn't be familiar at all. Say, for example, you are traveling to England for the first time. You are touring a cathedral, and suddenly it seems as if you have been in that very spot before. Or maybe you are having dinner with a group of friends, discussing some current political topic, and you have the feeling that you've already experienced this very thing -- same friends, same dinner, same topic.
Déjà vu may happen if a person experienced the current sensory twice successively. The first input experience is brief, degraded, occluded, or distracted. Immediately followed by that, the second perception might be familiar because the person naturally related it to the first input. One possibility behind this mechanism is that the first input experience involves shallow processing, which means that only some superficial physical attributes are extracted from the stimulus.
You’ve probably experienced déjà vu at least a few times in your life, and wondered, “What just happened to me?” Déjà Vu’s meaning comes from the phrase “already seen” in French, and occurs when we feel like a person, place, or thing is familiar to us without actually having experienced them before.
This strange phenomenon happens to as much as 70 percent of the population, but a higher number of 15 to 25 year olds experience it than any other age group.
Re-experiencing the unexperienced
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