Déjà vu Is Your Brain Screwing Up in a Super Specific Way

Is experiencing déjà vu a supernatural event or is it really just a human flaw?

When I was a kid, I had this friend who was convinced that she could see ghosts. She would tell me that ghosts whisper memories to her and that every once in a while when she least expected it, she would experience a strange sensation of having lived a moment before.

“Sarah, this is so weird,” she would say. “But I feel like I know this moment, like, I lived it before. I think the ghosts are reminding me of one of my past lives.”

What’s more, though, she was pretty sure that this phenomenon meant that she could tell the future. She swore that when she experienced déjà vu that it was some kind of gift from her ghost friends that enabled her to momentarily see the future. One time, after she had one of these bizarre moments, she turned to me with the most earnestly serious expression and asked me if I wanted to know the date and time of my future death. While I was curious, I was also a bit freaked out. Had my friend lost her mind? What was happening here?

I was not convinced that my friend was being visited by ghosts, although I too had occasionally felt that eerie sensation of wondering why a particular moment felt more like a deeply seeded memory than the newness of the present. This experience is called déjà vu, and similar to my friend, many people are convinced that this loopy misfire in the brain has…