If you haven’t experienced déjà vu yet, don’t worry, you’re still ahead. Studies show that up to 97% of healthy people have experienced this condition at least once in their life.
The state of déjà vu is like re-reading a long-read book or watching a movie that you have watched before but have completely forgotten what they are about. A person who is in such a state cannot remember what will happen in the next moment, but in the course of events he realizes that he saw these few minutes in detail as a reaction to several successive events. The whole power of experiencing déjà vu consists in the feeling that there were hundreds of options for how this moment could pass, however, the person in the state of deja vu preferred all the previous actions (right or wrong for him), as a result of which he was “destined” to be in this particular situation and in this place.
The impression of déjà vu can be so strong that memories of it can last for years. However, as a rule, a person is unable to recall any details about those events that, as it seems to him, he remembered when he experienced déjà vu.
Although déjà vu is a fairly common phenomenon, it cannot be induced artificially and is rarely experienced by any individual person. For this reason, scientific research on déjà vu is difficult.
Currently, it is reasonable to consider the assumption that the effect of déja vu can be caused by preliminary unconscious processing of information, for example, in a dream. In those cases when a person encounters in reality a situation perceived at the unconscious level and successfully modeled by the brain, close enough to a real event, and deja vu arises. This explanation is well supported by the high incidence of deja vu in healthy people.
A good example is the sense of déjà vu that an American visited on a tour of Fort Laramie, located in Wyoming. He was here for the first time, but suddenly it turned out that he knows a lot about the fort and is well versed in it. This case would have fallen into the category of mystical, if it hadn't happened by chance that the novel "Queen of Bedlam", recently read by our hero, is to blame. The fact is that the action of the novel takes place in this fort, and its structure and the surrounding area are described in great detail.