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Annals of Psychophysiology                                                                                                        Volume 3, October 2016                  
©Advance Educational Institute & Research Centre                                                                    www.aeirc-edu.com 

ISSN 2412 - 3188 
 

Perspective Piece 

Understanding DÉJÀ VU 
Kisa Fatima Altaf 

Advance Educational Institute and Research Centre 

Dadabhoy Institute of Higher Education 

Corresponding Author: Kisa@aeirc-edu.com 

 

Have you ever witnessed that, say for instance, you 

are migrating to Northern areas of Pakistan for the 

first time or you are playing basketball on a court and 

being cheered up by audience shouting only your 

name, and all of a sudden it feels like as if you have 

been in that very moment before or maybe you are 

having pizza with a group of friends, teasing a friend, 

and you have the feeling that you've already 

experienced this very thing -- same friends, same 

dinner, and same topic 60% of the populations, those 

who have experienced it for the first time assume it 

as Reincarnation. 

 

The phenomenon is comparatively complicated, and 

termed as Déjà vu. The word déjà vu is French and 

means, actual, "seen before". Those who have 

witnessed the feeling defined it as an astounding 

sense of familiarity with something that shouldn't be 

usual at all.  

 

There are various logics on that. Absolute reason is, 

sometimes our instinct gets puzzled that the occasion 

is happening in the present or past. So for 1-2 

seconds, we sense like we have lived this minute 

before. But not actually, 67% of people have had a 

déjà vu experience (a median of 41 surveys). 

 

Charles Dickens mentioned that We all have some 

wisdom of an awareness, that comes over us 

sometimes, of what we are doing and saying having 

been said and done before, in an isolated time—of 

our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the 

same faces, substances, and prospects—of our 

knowing completely what will be said next, as if we 

suddenly remembered it! 

 

There are countless philosophies as to why déjà vu 

happens. Swiss scholar Arthur Funkhouser proposes 

that there are certain "déjà experiences" and defends 

that in order to study better the phenomenon, the 

implication among the experiences need to be 

recognized. In the examples quoted above, 

Funkhouser would describe the first incidence 

as déjà visite (“visited already") and the other 

as déjà vecu/ déjà vu ("seen before or lived through"). 

 

Deja Vu refers to those different and generally 

strange moments when the current moment feels like 

the former. It is difficult to explain. A few people 

hunt their thoughts for dreams that might have been 

like the current situation. Others think that the action 

is what appears when things from past lives proceeds 

in this one. Both assumptions are impractical to 

justify, confound, or (until recently), interrogate. The 

assumption that it is about previous lives is a matter 

of belief. The perception that it has to do with dreams 

is less a matter of belief - only a specified people plea 

to recall previous lives, but relatively everyone 

commemorates few of their dreams. Some recall 

many of them. The concept of reincarnation that is 

most persistent with modernized brain science 

concludes that no thoughts or memories are passed 

from one life to the other. What is shifted is a set of 

alarms that emulates the states of consciousness. 

Thoughts don't need to go along. (Todd Murphy 

1999) 

 

As I know and can judge, dream is a fantasy or 

projection of visuals we see every day but with 

different scenarios we have never been through. It is 

a process in which the physiological aspects of the 

body and its psychological responses by the brain are 

saved in a part of the brain called sub-conscious. It is 

a part of the mind where the memories are saved and 

are highly approachable in dreams as all the other 

functions of the body are hibernated during sleep. 

(W. Hassan 2014). The subconscious and conscious 

mind is intertwined involving the same point in space 

and time at any one moment. The most persistent 

data in the déjà vu history is that the prevalence with 

which it is experienced declines with age. As well as 

75% people reports that they have experienced few 

forms of déjà vu. A large number of incidents happen 

in people of about 15 to 25 years older than in any 

other age group. 

 

Déjà-vu is a non-cognitive fault in which a situation 

has the sense of intimacy despite there being no 

definite antecedent in the past. Incidence of déjà-vu is 

most when people are in their 20s and almost fade 

after age 50. (Brown, Alan S. 2003). 

 

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Kisa Fatima Altaf 48 

  

Annals of Psychophysiology                                                                                                        Volume 3, October 2016                  
©Advance Educational Institute & Research Centre                                                                    www.aeirc-edu.com 

ISSN 2412 - 3188 
 

Since déjà vu happens in people with and without any 

medical status, there is much belief as to how and 

why this episode happens. Many psychoanalysts 

characterized déjà vu to simple illusion or 

gratification; at the same time some psychiatrists 

attribute it to an imbalance in the brain that originates 

the brain to oversight the present for the past.  

 

Some interesting researches on brain function cites 

that what we concern as "deja vu" is basically a 

"misfire" of the brain in between notion and encoding 

into memory, by which something that we "see" is 

literally encoded twice -- once, subliminally, and the 

next superluminally.  This left us with the "feeling" 

that we have experienced what we are observing in 

the past, because in our brains, we have. There is a 

massive time lag between all of our actions 

happening at the certain moment which is being 

composed at the subconscious level and the 

conscious point we experience as the real moment. 

 

 

 

 

Conclusion 

Many parapsychologists consider that it is linked to a 

past-life experience. Certainly, there are more 

researches, studies and reviews to be done. Time only 

runs in one direction. 

 

What I conclude is that deja vu is a sensual paradox, 

and not associated to time itself. Neuroscientists have 

come up with many assumptions about the 

experience of déjà vu, but no one had ever been 

justified. Authors and scientists have presented 

mystical statements. 

 

Reference 

 Brown, Alan S. "A review of the deja vu 

experience." Psychological bulletin129.3 

(2003): 394. 

 W.Hassan (2014). Understanding Dreams. 

Annals of Psychophysology (1) 14-15. 

 Todd Murphy (1999). “The experience of déjà 

vu in clinical and spiritual terms.” Sacred 

Pathway: The brains role in Religious and 

Mystic Experiences. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

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