Déjà Vu, trick of the brain or a echo of rebirth?

Two people sit across a table in a restaurant. Steam rises from the teacups. Evening falls outside. Someone at the next table laughs. And right in that moment, a quiet shiver runs through the mind — I have seen this before. This is the very first meeting with this person, yet somehow the conversation, the light, the moment — all of it feels familiar.

This feeling has a name — Déjà vu.

French in origin, the phrase means "already seen." Nearly 60 to 70 percent of people across the world have experienced it at least once in their lives. And yet its explanation remains incomplete — neither in science, nor in philosophy.

What Happens in the Brain?
Science tells us this is largely a glitch in memory processing. The human brain runs two separate memory systems — one for recognising familiarity, another for recalling specific events. Normally, both work in sync. But sometimes the "familiarity" system fires a little too early — and so the brain tags a brand new moment as something already known, even when it isn't.

Another reason is the overlap of sensory detail. The colour of the light in a room, the way someone tilts their head mid-sentence, the sound of a chair scraping the floor — any one of these might match something from the past. The brain latches onto that single similarity and marks the entire moment as old.

In the age of social media, the experience has grown more layered. Before you ever meet someone in person, you have already seen their photographs, read their words, watched their expressions through a screen. So when you finally sit across from them, the brain says, with quiet certainty — I know this person. It is not wrong. But the source of that familiarity is virtual, not lived.

What Does Philosophy Say?

Where science offers answers, philosophy asks deeper questions.

Across many philosophical traditions, déjà vu has been linked to the idea of reincarnation. In Hindu and Buddhist thought, the soul is believed to travel through many lifetimes, carrying with it faint traces of what came before. In this light, déjà vu may be the shadow of a moment from a past life — a brief surfacing of something the conscious mind has long forgotten, but the soul quietly remembers.

Plato approached this differently. His theory of Anamnesis proposed that before birth, the soul inhabits a realm of pure knowledge and truth. Upon entering the world, that knowledge is forgotten — but certain moments, certain images, can stir it awake again. For Plato, to learn was not to discover something new, but to remember something ancient.

Carl Jung, one of the great minds of modern thought, placed the experience within a different frame entirely. He believed in what he called the collective unconscious — a deep reservoir of experience and memory shared not by one person, but by all of humanity. Déjà vu, in his view, might be a glimpse into that shared inheritance, a moment where the individual brushes against something far older than their own life.