Deja Vu

Maybe I had worked too hard and started to daydream or maybe I really possessed some unknown psychic power.

I was staring at some spreadsheet and suddenly it seemed like I have seen this so many times and knew what would happen next. I was so stunned by the familiarity of this scene that it was almost I had seen this before. Had I dreamt this before?

I exclaimed to my colleague that I might have dreamt of this worksheet and the work before. My boss heard my surprised comment and walked out of his cubicle. I thought he was finally going to acknowledge that maybe I do garner some supernatural powers. My boss, being my boss, and being well-read and a great fan of Discovery Channel, offered a rather scientific explanation to what was happening to me.

He told me that the sense of deja vu could be explain using simple biology. Sometimes, our minds tricked us into believing that we have witnessed something before because one of our eyes read the image faster than the other and had transmitted the signals to our brain. The different speeds of transmission between the two eyes caused our brain to register a certain image before it registered that we were seeing the image. This resulted in a feeling of deja vu. His so matter-of-fact explanation dashed all my hopes of my having some unknown power.

Hence, the next time you have a similar experience as me, please do not jump to the conclusions of a past life or an ability to read the future, it is simply a biological phenomenon.