Ramblings :: Déjà Vu

Consider the following theory regarding déj vu:Our minds are constantly working, thinking, trying to figure things out. Part of figuring things out is making predictions. We do this all the time. The light turns red, we expect to see people stop. We turn on the light switch, we expect the light to come on. This is a simple concept: gather information, and predict future information.

Now, I propose that our minds do this subconsciously all the time, and at a level of detail far greater than what our conscious minds can grasp. Also, that our subconscious is capable, and readily predicts hundreds of different outcomes for any one event. Imagine predicting not only that the cars will stop, but which cars will come around the corner, how fast they will move, etc.If our subconscious could predict an infinite number of possible outcomes, then we would essentially always have at least one correct prediction. Unfortunately, our minds are limited in how much they can do, and so we cannot always be sure we have a correct prediction. But, let's say we do. We are in our cars, have just made 100 predictions, and little do we know, that one of them is about to be shown as correct. The cars stop just how you predicted, the music is just like you predicted, they are the colour you just predicted, etc. This information enters your brain and into your subconscious. Your subconscious recognizes that what just flowed into it is the same as what it just created, and your mind sparks, and your subconscious communicates this information back to your conscious mind.Thus, you consciously encounter two instances of the same event; one is what you just saw, and the other is from your subconscious. Because you are consciously aware of the fact that you cannot know anything you did not encounter, you assume that the message from your subconcsious must have been something you encountered at a different time, and you interpret it as a feeling that you are seeing something in now that you believe to have seen before. You experience déj vu.Why don't you feel déj vu all the time? Simple, your subconscious makes only so many predictions. Because the number of ways the event can occur far surpass the number of predictions you can make, it is more likely the event will be one you have not predicted, and so your subconscious will trigger no reaction.

A few things are shady, however. There is obviously a certain level of detail that you must have in your predictions in order to create the feeling of déj vu. What level of detail is this? Predicting simply that the cars will stop does not lead to déj vu, yet predicting the position of every molecule seems ridiculously impossible. I am of the opinion that your prediction need only be as detailed as an average memory in order to be felt as déj vu.This is all possible. Yet, there may be one other part to all this. Perhaps, your subconscious does not send just one of its predictions to your conscious. It may be that it sends bits and pieces of each prediction so that they create a full prediction, picking and choosing which parts to send based on which parts agree with what you have actually observed. If this were the case, however, we must have two things: (1) our subconscious would have to predict events far into the future, if it predicted single events at one point in time then it would only have x, y, z to choose from, instead of x+y+z to rearrange; and (2) which is that to have #1, our subconscious would have to not only predict many things, but to a level of detail equivalent to memory, and do so on a regular enough basis that allows for the generally regular experiences of déj vu. To do this, I feel, would require the computation of far too many variables, and make the task of getting a set of predictions that when rearranged would form the actual event so difficult as to render it utterly impossible to be undertaken by the human brain.

For these reasons, I suspect that déj vu predicts events that might immediately follow events currently being witnessed, and predicts for an exact point of time in the future--like the pause frame of a video cassette--instead of for what might be a long string of events--like if the cassette were in play mode.These things I reason are an adequate explanation to the phenomenon of déj vu. It explains not only how, but why, and gives explanation for the frequency of this phenomenon.