"It’s like déjà vu all over again." —Yogi Berra
Most of us have felt it: that uncanny jolt when the present feels recycled, as if we’ve already lived this exact moment. It’s vivid, disorienting, and fleeting. The French call it déjà vu—“already seen.” Some call it supernatural. Science calls it a brain glitch.
"Even the slightest déjà vu are supernatural incidents." —Sushmita Sen
At its core, déjà vu is a memory misfire. Normally, your brain tags fresh experiences as new, then files them away. But sometimes the wiring hiccups. The feeling of familiarity fires before the memory check is done, tricking you into thinking you’ve seen this movie before. Neuroscientists describe it as a temporary desynchronization between memory circuits—a slip in the brain’s timing.
Around 60–70% of people report déjà vu. It skews young; teens and twenty-somethings feel it more, likely because their memory systems are still calibrating. And for people with temporal lobe epilepsy, déjà vu often shows up right before a seizure, further linking it to electrical oddities in the brain’s memory hubs.
"Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time... I think I’ve forgotten this before." —Steven Wright
Of course, culture and philosophy have had their say. Freud once blamed it on repressed memories (Freud blamed a lot of things on repression). Pop culture gave us The Matrix, where déjà vu signals a glitch in the code. And Philip K. Dick took it to the extreme, suggesting it’s proof we’re living in a computer simulation with reality tweaks slipping through.
"We are living in a computer-programmed reality… déjà vu is the only clue we have." —Philip K. Dick
Science is more modest. Déjà vu isn’t a sign of a past life or a parallel universe. It’s your brain mislabeling the now as the already. A bug in the wetware. But maybe that’s the beauty: for a second, you glimpse the fragile, fallible way your mind stitches time together.
So when déjà vu hits you, don’t panic. Don’t go searching for oracles or portals. Just smile—it’s your brain reminding you how strange, slippery, and fascinating reality really is.