Between 60 and 75 percent of the world’s humans will experience déjà vu at least once. Roughly 56 percent of children who have reported experiencing it before the age of 12 panicked, thinking that they were going crazy, and up until about 35 years ago, it was commonly mistaken as the earliest symptoms of memory-depleting syndromes such as dementia or Alzheimer’s. Thankfully, these illnesses are not nearly as common as this strange quirk of the human brain.

It generally occurs in one of two distinctive ways, although several people have reported experiencing both types during separate incidences. An individual can feel like they can predict the future, like they have been in that exact same time and place with the exact same people before. Occasions of an individual actually finishing sentences of another individual have been seen. Those uneducated about this occurrence may actually think they can predict the future. The other type occurs about 0.5 to 2 seconds after an incident occurs, when an individual will feel as if they had experienced the scenario or conversation that had just occurred twice. There have been 45 documented cases in New Jersey in the last nine years of a person coming to a hospital or other emergency healthcare facility claiming to be schizophrenic after experiencing this mental phenomenon. No diagnosis or prescription medication is required to thwart this cranial tweak, because frankly, there is literally no way to avoid it. There is no psychic power or psychosis associated with it. It’s called déjà vu, and although that may sound like a super power, I assure you it is not.

For those of you who are only aware of the word déjà vu because it was the title of a Beyoncé song from 2006, allow me to educate you. On Merriam-Webster.com, there are actually two definitions of the phenomenon. The first is the “simple definition,” and it reads, “the feeling that you have already experienced something that is actually happening for the first time.” And the second, the “full definition,” reads, “the illusion of remembering scenes and events when experienced for the first time.” How unusual is it that the human body can actually create its own illusions, as said in the latter definition, in order to confuse our own being?

Déjà vu most commonly occurs in individuals between the age of 15-25, which is why the experience of déjà vu into one’s 50s and 60s is sometimes mistaken as a symptom of a disease. “Déjà vu” is a French term that literally translates to “already seen” and it is widely recognized as one of the most difficult aspects of the human mind to study, since there is no rhyme, reason, illness or gene attributed to it. Déjà vu is suggested to be some sort of "mix-up between sensory input and memory-recalling output” (psychologytoday.com). This theory is often challenged by those who believe in reincarnation, such as doctor of philosophy Denis Rigfeild of Germany.

“There is certainly evidence to support the theory of evolution. However, there is no evidence to either confirm or deny the theory of reincarnation and that human souls can live multiple different lives.” (Rigfeild.) If what Doctor Rigfeild believes in is indeed true, that means that humans hypothetically interact with the same souls in different bodies throughout the different lives they have lived. This theoretically means that a couple could have been together in every lifetime they’ve lived, because it was their souls that were familiar, not their bodies, which is actually a beautifully abstract concept to consider.

So there you have it: For any individual who experienced this and was completely convinced that they were losing their mind, you weren’t. For anybody who thought that they had a super power (I know you’re out there), sorry to tell you, but you don’t. Nothing about the occurrence of déjà vu makes a person special because there is no way to effectively track and study it. Which begs the question, is it really just a random human phenomenon, or the tip of an iceberg to a much deeper and intricate concept that may be the bedrock of every emotion in our lives? The world will probably never know, but we can believe what we want.