Regarding "having a feeling you've been here before".....in a city you've never been to before.
Something you should know, each city is not 100% unique. Architect firms farm out building plans to different companies in different cities so that they can turn a profit. They may tweak them a little, but the basic size, shape, finishes will all be the same.
Couple that with the fact that (really in the US) they all have similar street names. For eg: just about every US city has a Martin Luther King way/st/rd/blvd, they all have a JFK something, most if not all have a main street, and don't even get me started on Atlanta with their Peach Tree st/rd/ave/blvd/rt and even then, they have multiples of each.
Now couple that with the fact that you have a starbucks on just about every corner etc and it isn't unrealistic to have a streetscape look pretty much identitical to any number of other streetscapes. A good example of this is chinatown on dundas. Go into ANY Canadian and US city and they'll all look pretty much identical. This is amplified due to the fact that you can't read the signs.
Now add to that the fact that your brain "sees" and processes information in a way that it fills in the blanks. Kind of like how one reads. You don't read every word, you see the word in its entirety and process the word. For eg: you don't read B U S I N E S S business. You read
bus^&&^...business.... Same as "scenes". You don't see every leaf on every tree and every tree. You see the general image.
Another explanation is the "deja Vu" feeling you get. That is where the information your brain is precessing gets put into long term memory instead of recent memory. Then instantly you recall it from long term memory and think, wow, I know this place. You really don't know it any more than the next place, just that you think you do because you're bringing it up out of deep storage instead of recent.....
Or it could just be they're fucking with the matrix again lol.....
