Déjà vu

I have no idea whether it's autism, or craziness, but I have always got deja-vu a lot too. I have a hunch that my autism, or possibly attention deficit, has something to do with it, for a few reasons...

• My sense of time is incredibly bad. I'm terrible at putting memories in the right order, and often have little sense of how long ago an event happened (unless I specifically remember being a child, for example.)
• I can sometimes very clearly remember doing something which I haven't actually done, but had spent a long time planning in my head.
• I live a lot of my life by routines, and I seem to be able to do many of them without much conscious awareness of it. For example, if I go out on a walk, but have something eating away at my mind, I can get home with no memory of where I went or what route I took. I call these my "autopilots".
• The routines mean that there are very many days which are almost exactly the same. I'm very struck sometimes by how the deja-vu very powerfully tells me "exactly this very moment, this very thing", then, when I think about it, the scene is really completely unremarkable.

I read an article in New Scientist about deja-vu that was rather interesting a while ago. What they suggested is that our brains are constantly running a little simulation of what is about to happen next, to predict the result of our actions. This gets compared with what actually ends up happening, and our mind uses any differences to correct itself. The hypothesis was that deja-vu is a little peek into this process working; for some reason, the simulation gets mistaken for a memory, so if reality matches the simulation very closely, it seems like reality has happened before. Not so different to the explanation in the "Matrix" films, in some ways!

The things I mentioned above certainly make something along those lines ring true to me, and I wonder whether the executive functioning deficits often found in autism might explain these, or similar, strange memory effects.