Our minds can play tricks on us. There’s so much phenomena that’s both indescribable and proved by science – we may not be able to put a steady finger on why we feel the way we do sometimes, but scientists have at least been able to put a name to strange sensations.
Most people are familiar with déjà vu – the sensation that we’ve experienced something before. Familiarity with something, someone or an event that you can’t quite remember in full conjures up an eery, “I’ve been here before but I don’t know when” feeling. Déjà vécu takes déjà vu one step further by giving intense detail to the familiar event. Déjà visité is similar to both phenomena, but it’s much less common.
If you’ve ever traveled to a new place and have inexplicable knowledge of the location, you’ve experienced déjà visité. You may know your way around a new town, but not know why you know it. The difference between déjà visité and déjà vécu is the difference between spatial relationships and temporal phenomena.
However, this doesn’t mean that you had another life in which you lived in the town or landscape. The knowledge could come from something you don’t remember, an occurrence that’s lost in the back of your mind. In the book “Our Old Home, “Nathaniel Hawthorne writes about an experience he had when visiting an old, ruined castle. Unbeknownst to him why, he had complete knowledge of the entire layout of the castle. While this is considered déjà visité, the knowledge came from a poem he’d read years earlier and forgotten. Alexander Pope describes the same castle in accuracy in one of his poems.
Déjà visité means, literally, “already visited.” Similar phenomena include déjà senti, jamais vu and presque vu. When someone experiences déjà senti, they feel that they have already felt something before. A good example of this is having the feeling that you just spoke out loud, when in fact you didn’t say anything. Jamai vu is the opposite of déjà vu – a person is in a familiar situation that they do not recognize. The eeriness that accompanies déjà vu is the same, but the person doesn’t recognize a situation, person or place that they actually are familiar with. This may be a side effect of brain fatigue. Presque vu is also referred to as the “Tip of the Tongue” sensation – a strong feeling of knowing what you want to say accompanies the inability to find the right words.
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