>>11476908>How does deja vu even work?A fluke in how the brain's recollection i.e. 'memory' works.
Basically, the human brain's method is two-track:
One track based on deep retrieval of information, consciously connecting related events, images, etc. until you remember. The other is a quick-n-dirty track with something the brain is incredibly efficient at: pattern matching. The brain quickly matches a current situation against similar experiences and observations and "clicks" if something matches close enough.
Déjà vu is likely when the pattern match gets it wrong, but a correcting signal from the slower track comes up too late then you're kind of left in a limbo where your brain lies to you about remembering an event for a few moments until conscious thought _would_ have corrected that. But because the idea of you remembering something has already entered conscious thought at that point, it no longer course-corrects and ... déjà vu.
Another explanation is found in the fact that the brain dual-processes; incoming signals are sorted in the temporal lobe _twice_ - once from each hemisphere. The theory for déjà vu is that normally these signals arrive very, very closely together and the temporal lobe will 'de-duplicate' them and that if for some reason the delay is too big, you may infact experience them as two separate signals - one after the other.
There are a number more theories like this. All of them boil down to the same race-condition where the brain starts experiencing one event as two distinct events where either may be processed wrong.
