Déjà vu: A glitch in your brain or did your consciousness travel to the future?
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "Déjà vu: A glitch in your brain or did your consciousness travel to the future?")
Feel like you have already seen something? Or that something is going to happen? That's because time might not be linear
It is common to feel something is about to happen even when you have no way of knowing it. This is believed to happen because our consciousness can possibly travel to the future, as in reality, time is not linear. This is why our brain has memories of things that haven't happened yet.
After 9/11, the world couldn't stop talking about a person named Nostradamus. He was a French astrologer who lived in the 16th century and apparently predicted the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York. He wrote about a "fire approaching a great new city", which people interpret to mean the aeroplanes that hit the World Trade Centre towers in the bustling American city. Baba Vanga is another mystic from Bulgaria who is believed to have had visions about the Chernobyl disaster, World War II, Princess Diana's death, the September 11 attacks, the 2004 tsunami and even her own death. Ryo Tatsuki of Japan recently became famous as she apparently saw the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami in her dreams and wrote about it in a manga comic. There is no evidence to suggest that these events were predicted by these people. However, premonitions are not unheard of. Even regular people have them. Remember the gut feeling you had about someone, or felt off about visiting a place? All that might be linked to our brain taking a trip to the future. At least that's what some scientists think. In fact, this theory also explains why we have a sense of deja vu, that something has already happened.
Is time linear? Experts think time is very different from how humans see it
The scientific term for having a feeling about a future event, or that something is going to happen in the future, is precognition. It is an extrasensory perception or foreknowledge of an event. At times, we also feel like we have already experienced something before. Cognitive neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge got pulled towards studying it after she had these visions as a child. Once her father got on a plane for a business trip and was in a crash. When she heard the news, she recalled thinking at the time he left that she would never see him again. How do we get that feeling about something that hasn't happened yet? We view time as linear, something that can only go forward without skipping any of the parts. However, some experts think that time is not how humans perceive it.
Psychologists and neuroscientists have been trying to understand this extrasensory perception. Mossbridge, who is a visiting scholar at Northwestern University and a fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, was quoted by Popular Mechanics as saying. "We don’t understand how time works. Even physicists are admitting they really don’t know how it works. We are stuck on this idea that, if you’re truly scientific, you are going to think about time linearly, but is it really linear?"
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Quantum mechanics says time isn't a physical reality
Parapsychologist Dean Radin, PhD, the chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, says our consciousness is likely beyond the linear perception of time that humans have. “Time is not how we experience it on an everyday level," he says. “In quantum mechanics, time may not even be part of our physical reality. It’s not that time doesn’t exist. It just behaves in a much stranger way than how it is seen through the lens of the human experience.”
Also Read: Between Japan and Alaska, a dark alien world at 31,000 feet has stunned scientists. Here's why
Mossbridge and Radin conducted experiments to dig deeper into this unshakeable feeling. Participants were wired to an EEG machine and shown random images. When they saw a positive image, their brain showed little activity. When there was a spike in brain activity, it meant that they had a feeling that the next image would be a negative one. They discovered that everyone has some level of precognition. Radin even studied Tibetan oracles who could peek into the future. He says their visions happened as a result of their ability to not only go beyond time but also space.
Humans have a memory from future
Radin has a scientific explanation for precognition. He says it is a form of quantum entanglement where particles entangled with each other are supposed to share the same information and behave in the same way. Radin thinks this explains why humans have a memory about something that hasn't happened yet. He adds that "our consciousness can jump outside ordinary experience and receive information from the past or future." This memory also explains why we sometimes have a sudden feeling of having been to a place before, or the exact same things unfolding that feel like they have happened before.
“Some people hypothesise that precognition is your brain entangled with itself in the future, because entanglement is not only things separated in space, but also separated in time,” Radin states. “If it can be entangled with itself in the future, in the present, you’d be feeling something like a memory that is going to happen in the future.” This explains not only precognition, but also déja vû and that feeling in the pit of your stomach.
