A Brain Tickling Illusion

I bet most of you have felt a specific brain tickling illusion at some point of life. A sudden feeling, "I have experienced the same situation once before. Just exact same environment, same people but can't recall ". Even in a completely new place, it may feel to you..Spooky!!

This strange well-known phenomena of mind is called "Déjà Vu", a French word, which means "Already Seen" and first coined by a Frenchman named Émile Boirac in his book.

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Déjà vu is firmly associated with temporal lobe epilepsy. Reportedly, déjà vu can occur right before the onset of a temporal lobe seizure. So it proves that you can actually bring on déjà vu in people with epilepsy stimulating their brain with  electromagnetism!

But question comes "Why normal people experience déjà vu?"  Science  really has no clear idea what's going on with déjà vu, that's why it’s still a thrilling topic! Mystery! Mystery ! And mystery! 

Even so about 40 theories tried to explain the term as it's common case to 70% people but all theories are limited by the word "May be".

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Dutch psychiatrist Herman N.Sno proposed hologram theory. Hologram theory claims that may be some fragments of a memory or experience, like a smell or a sound brings a larger full scene on your brain when you feel déjà vu. 

Suppose you are sitting in a restaurant you have never been before and a song is playing on the radio. Suddenly you are feeling déjà vu .May be many years ago you heard the same song anywhere, may be as a passersby's ringtone. It's useless enough to store the information in your brain, still it may linger in your memory. So your brain takes the fragment to reconstruct a memory featuring all five senses. Thus when your brain reconstruct a three dimensional event out of one dimensional memory fragment, déjà vu hits!

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Our various sensory inputs, sounds,sights, smells are normally processed and mixed together as one event. According to dual processing theory déjà vu occurs when there is a slight delay in the pathway of one of those stimuli. As there are multiple pathways through which our brains process the incoming informations, it’s possible that those pathways may not always synchronize correctly.  The late arriving information could be flagged as a different event. When it plays over the already recorded  moment it feels as it has happened before. 

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Human Brain is like a puzzle which is still largely unsolved. Brain can also glitch. Leaky processing theory is based on this malfunction of brain. You might be getting déjà vu for just a moment when your brain malfunctions. Normally new memories stored in our short term memory before being written into the long term storage. But if any information skip the short term storage and access directly to the long term it may feel like we are experiencing something from the past.

Déjà vu can also occur when we focus on one part of our environment, the rest of our world drifts to the unconsciousness and snapping  back to the reality it feels like we have been there before. Because we have..just now!

(Photo credit.Google) 

Again the feeling of familiarity could be because you have actually had the same experience but simply don't remember it as the experience was useless, still it might be lingering in some remote part of your brain. It may also be experiences from dreams, movies,books etc.

Additionally some groups and cultures claim religious or spiritual fact behind this brain tickling illusion and according to some the mystery surrounds the parallel universe.  So, it’s up to you is it science or something else.

Keep your curiosity burning!

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