Deja vu - share your experiences

[Toonces]

I used to have deja vu pretty frequently when I was younger. I haven't had it in years, but a couple of weeks ago I had a deja vu experience. It really freaked me out. I did some research and found one study that indicated deja vu happens more frequently during times of anxiety. Have you found this to be true? I have PPD so this would make sense in my case.

[MrsD108]

When I was a kid I always pictured this yellow house with big bushes in the front of it. One of the bushes had the letter J cut out on the top.
I moved to Virginia when I was 22 years old and moved next to the exact same house that I had seen in my head for over 15 years.

[PinkMartini]

Cool thread... Deja vu really interests me.

I've gotten it a lot, as far back as I can remember, usually I'll feel it once every few months or so. I just had a deja vu experience this morning! I was sitting here researching something on the computer and looked down at the keyboard and when I looked up again, I felt like I had been in that exact same situation before, reading the same stuff online, typing the same thing, my DS sitting in his bouncy seat babbling on, ect... The thing is, I don't recall ever looking that subject up before :eek:

I, too have heard that it happens more frequently when stressed.

What exactly IS deja vu? I've heard a ton of different beliefs as to what it is exactly, I'm curious to see what you all think it is...

[Toonces]

I've always thought of it in the literal sense - "I've been here before." For some reason, I never researched it until it happened recently. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9j%C3%A0_vu) has some cool info on it. As much as it freaks me out, I want to have another incident. :p :)

I moved to Virginia when I was 22 years old and moved next to the exact same house that I had seen in my head for over 15 years.

That gave me chills!

My recent incident happened when I was at a PPD support group meeting. I was sitting at a table in the conference room, nursing DS, talking with another woman when all of a sudden I felt like I had been there before, talking about the same thing, in the same room, with that same woman. I had never been in that room before, nor had I ever met that woman before. Maybe I was feeling anxiety before the meeting.. ??

[Hello Kitty]

This is totally unscientific wording :p but DH has researched it a bit. As I understand, it's basically a disconnect in your brain where it stores a current situation in long term memory. So your brain is reading the situation and it says, 'heyy, that happened a long time ago' to your current line of thought, and it makes you feel all freaky. ;)

I'll have to see if it has to do with being anxious/stressed.

[PinkMartini]

Hmmm that explanation makes sense - but I wonder how it fits in with what MrsD108 explained? :confused:

[Hello Kitty]

That's really not deja vu. Deja vu has to deal with feeling like something [current] has happened before. It's not thinking about something random now and then eventually having it come to fruition in the future.

The only way that it could be considered deja vu is if she drove up to the house (with no recollection of thinking about it from her childhood) and her brain said 'oh, we used to daydream about this house'. Which, in that case, wouldn't be true, so it would be that disconnect there.

[PG-rated]

There was a story in the NYT Magazine a few months ago about a rare brain disorder that causes people to experience more or less constant deja vu - some of the cases they mentioned were people who did things like cancel library cards because they claimed they had read all the books, or call TV stations to claim they were always showing reruns.

The way the article described the deja vu phenomenon went something like this: Your brain's memory has two separate functions, one to bring up the memory and one to trigger the feeling that you've experienced it in the past. So deja vu happens when your brain accidentally triggers that "memory" feeling without it being connected to the recall function.