Welcome to I Am Your Target Demographic and today we’re looking at deja vu.
We're gonna talk about what it means, we're going to talk about how this is caused, and
generally some explanations or theories as to what makes this happen.
Deja vu is a feeling that about two/thirds of all people will experience at some point,
but some people might only experience this once in their life while others, deja vu is
a reoccurring thing.
So some of you have never had deja vu and will never have deja vu.
So the feeling that you get is that you're... when you see something or hear something or
you're in a place, you feel like you've been there before.
And it's not just a memory that you're like "Oh, I think I've been here," it's like "I
know I haven't been here or I haven't been in this situation" but it feels like you have.
Now deja vu is interesting because you can't really study it.
What we're going to talk about are all theories because you can't predict when deja vu is
going to happen, some people will never get deja vu.
There's really no way to know when it's going to happen and know who it's going to happen to.
So it's a bit of a mystery.
No one really knows why it's caused but we have a couple leading theories.
Now, there is a type of déjà vu that accompanies a few neurological disorders, such as epilepsy,
where electrical discharges are causing these false recollections.
There are also cases of certain drugs causing reoccurring déjà vu.
Neither of these cases are what we’re talking about today.
Today we’re discussing the sudden and unexplained déjà vu that many people will face, maybe
only once in their life.
Or maybe never!
Now the first big theory and one of my favorite theories for why deja vu is a thing is called
dual processing.
This was a study started by Dr. Robert Efron in the 1960s.
Now imagine this.
Most cases of déjà vu come from seeing or hearing something and feeling like you’ve
already seen or heard it.
Now imagine if you’re tired or stressed or even drunk.
Something is slowing down your brain, causing just a little bit of lag.
Imagine that you see someone walk into the room.
The image is transmitted to your brain’s temporal lobe through both the left and right hemispheres.
It goes through your left hemisphere normal but it takes just a millisecond longer to
travel through your right hemisphere.
So your brain gets the image, then immediately receives the same image a second time.
Your brain says “We’ve seen this before” when in reality it was just a millisecond
earlier, but your brain doesn’t make that distinction.
Same when you hear things, it travels to your brain through multiple paths and one of those
paths is just delayed a bit.
You get the sense of familiarity but you’re not actually familiar.
Another theory that makes a lot of sense is that everything you've ever seen or heard
is stored deep in your mind, even if you can't actively remember it.
And when you see or witness something that is incredibly close to something you’ve
once experienced, you may get déjà vu.
Imagine that you once walked through a doorway into a room and it had a table and a few chairs
and a large bookcase.
Now, you walk through a different doorway, much later in life, but the furniture is in
the same place.
You’ve never been in this room, but enough pieces of the puzzle come together and your
brain starts to think, “Wait, have we been here before?” even though you know logically
that you never have.
You can also get this from places you’ve never been.
If you see something on TV or in a movie, it's stored in there and then you see a place
in real life that echoes that pattern and your brain thinks "We've been here" when in
reality, it was a scene from a movie that you saw ten years ago.
Now there is a theory that is a little harder to prove, that some people find really interesting
and that's the idea that you dream and something that you see in your dreams comes to reality.
Now there have been studies done and they've been able to replicate this at about a 10%
success rate, that 10% of the time they're able to...
Someone logged what they dreamt about and later were able to say, that matches up with
what I dreamt.
This is hard to prove and may just be a case of self-fulfilling prophecies.
If I logged a dream about being in a blue room, I would obviously be more aware of,
and even looking for, blue rooms in the future.
Is it really prophetic dreams or am I just looking for similarities in the world?
Hard to gauge.
Lastly, in terms of mainstream pop culture, déjà vu was references in the film The Matrix.
And in the movie The Matrix, deja vu is a symbol that something glitches, something
happens in this reality that we're living in, that something changed or someone entered the Matrix.
Something has happened.
So a lot of people might say when they get deja vu, "Oh, there's a glitch in the Matrix."
But that's just fiction.
As far as we know.
So which theory do you think is true?
Do you get deja vu a lot?
Tell us all about it, tell us "These are the times I've experienced it" or I never have,
or I'm waiting to.
What do you think about deja vu, are there other phenomenons like this that you'd want
to see us talk about?
So let me know down in the comments, we're always looking for a weekly topic to break
down and discuss, give me your suggestions.
Thanks for watching IAYTD, you can check out some recommended videos right here, thanks for watching.