Have you ever felt that you know someone,although you meet him and hear his voice for the first time?

It happened to me today.I met a woman whose face and voice seemed familiar.She doesn't look like anyone else I know.It's strange but it seemed to me that i knew her.How is that explained?

Have you ever felt that you know someone,although you meet him and hear his voice for the first time?
This is an effect of your brain processing information into categories. Your brain puts little chunks of information that you gather into categories over your lifespan. Often when we meet someone or see something, little pieces of information come to the surface of our memory. The reason we have difficulty getting an accurate picture or sense that we know this person or thing is because it is only a small representation of something we have already experienced. Put it this way. A simple example is if you met someone many years ago with an unusual nose (super large, small ,abnormal etc), you may have imprinted that impression on your brain yet you do not go around for the rest of your life thinking about it. However when you meet someone with a similar charateristic you think they are familiar to you......its your brain picking up on that one aspect of the individual. Further when you seem to see several things in one person, for example the voice sounds familiar and the face, then it may not be all from the same previous experience, it just may be that those features/characteristics are coincidentally associated with that one person. Your brain is very complex and it has to chunk information together in some categories to make sense of its environment. Its like we all have a junk drawer at home where we put things that really dont matter at the time but we just dont want to throw it away.... your brain works on the same principles. Hope this helps. :)
Reply:Did she feel the same way? Spiritual explanation if that is what you are looking for is that your souls recognized eachother either from another life or from the future (as some believe that all time exists at once) Perhaps it is unexplainable - so many things are.....
Reply:I wonder about that too. Perhaps you knew her in another life.
Reply:Yes I've had that feeling a number of times and it is usually a nice thing to feel. However there have been a few where I've felt like a foul grease has been spread over my body with some of the people I've met, and felt I've known them from somewhere else. Those people I leave alone and don't bother with them again. The others I find a friendship with.


The reason why we feel like this when meeting someone new, is because the individual exhibits familiar patterns we have become accustomed to with our personal past history. So we feel like we have met them before, but we are really just picking up on pleasant, or unpleasant experiences in our lives.
Reply:Sure! This is one flavor of "deja vu." I believe it is a result of the fact that the experience of self-awareness lags our sensory and the motor systems. That is to say we know and do before (actually, about 200 milliseconds before) we are aware of it.





Sometimes (in my theory) the timing of associated memories, sensation, and awareness get a little out of order. In electronic circuits, this is called a "race condition." Something similar in the brain accounts for your experience.
Reply:for me its the same thing but first i dream about a stranger and then i meet them the next day and i feel like we had meet before it might be that
Reply:There is a theory in Paganism that spirits can be split upon a person's death and then in the next incarnation if the halves meet, they will know each other instantly. Or it could be that this person has features or qualities that you have met in your early childhood and have forgotten until now.
Reply:It happens to me a lot...wish I could know the answer
Reply:Past life maybe? Resembles someone you already know? Maybe you met them previously just briefly and you can't place it.