Reflection of the evening sun on wet pavement. A gentle breeze brings a barely perceptible but achingly familiar smell. The last drops of rain fall from the tree branches. A shoe slips on wet leaves, a sound that echoes in my head as if it were once heard before. A passer-by bends down and clumsily picks up a fallen wet newspaper. When he reaches out, I feel that I have met him once before. A feeling of having been there before comes over me, a sensation of inner warmth runs through my body. That almost physical feeling quickly fades, but the soft nostalgia remains, it colors my day and I feel happy.
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Dr. John Robson believed that déjà vu supported his theory. The theory that a man is the source of knowledge of the Universe, that all the information of the Universe is encoded in his mind (this theory is best stated in the book, "Absolute Beauty = Truth" by John Robson. University of Maryland Press, 1956). He was not satisfied with Dr. Ephron’s theory explaining déjà vu as a double processing of information. He also categorically rejected the hypothesis that déjà vu is the result of psychological or neurological disorders. Dr. Robson accepted in principle the theories of cryptomnesia and internal memory, but doubted whether they could explain all cases of déjà vu. Yes, human memory is incredibly capacious and long-lasting. Every one of us has dredged up names or events from memory that seemed long forgotten. Sometimes it is a painful process - you have forgotten a name that you knew for sure, and trying to remember it does not work. Then suddenly you remember the name. That means it was stored in your memory and has not been erased by time. But Dr. Robson's research has shown that déjà vu is often not based on experience. Various associative theories have tried to explain this phenomenon as the brain's ability to synthesize a supposedly already lived experience when external stimuli are favorable. Like dreams, such "memory" often has no real basis. However, new experiments with hypnosis sessions and direct brain stimulation have disproved these theories one by one.
According to Dr. Robson, the source of déjà vu is information that is inherently encoded in the human brain, or more generally - in human mind. Information is not the right term for it because déjà vu is often not easy to quantify, thought Dr. Robson. Rather, it is knowledge, experience of the Universe, genetic memory. It is an approach to Truth. That is why déjà vu has such a strong emotional charge - it sometimes produces a state of bliss. In the second 1965 edition of "Absolute Beauty = Truth" Dr. Robson added a chapter on déjà vu as a polemical response to Dr. Ephron’s dual information processing theory published in 1964. His main argument was that déjà vu is a sensory, not a rational experience.
After Dr. Robson's death in 1992, Dr. Brown resurrected and refined Dr. Robson's theory. In Dr. Brown's view, déjà vu is not only based on the primordial experience encoded in the brain, but also on the ability of human sensors to connect to the Universe and tap into its knowledge pool. That knowledge may not always be verbalized, because our language is inadequate to describe it - he quoted Dr. Robson - but it is intuitive, emotional, and unbounded by space and time. This definition of the Universe is more like that of an extra-spatial and extra-temporal God. Our sensors can connect to the Universe-God at any point in spacetime, or at all points at once, so sometimes we can remember things that happened to us a long time ago, but most of the time, we "remember" things that we have not experienced in our lives. That connection to the Universe-God is a source of bliss. Dr. Brown later generalized this theory to include dreams he studied in 2004-06.
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Another time I'm driving home from work, I think about tasks I haven't finished or problems I’ve got to solve. Nothing too bad, and nothing too good. Just a usual day with its cares and worries. Suddenly, something ephemeral - whether it's a flash of sunshine or a smell - takes me for a moment to a completely different place in a completely different time. A warmth comes over me and I feel good, I don't even know why.