When this region becomes hyperactive, the person feels familiar, but that feeling is not complemented by recollection, which makes the experience surreal. So, the present theory is that epileptic déjà vu is the result of unusual electricity discharges in the brain’s “familiarity” region. Recollection would be something like asking yourself after that glance, “Who is that man? Someone I saw last weekend in a cafe?” That’s a little different from ‘recollection’.

At this moment, you have a ‘familiarity’ response. Imagine that your dad walks into your room and you glance over at him.

Let’s try to understand this with an example. This ‘recognition’ is different from ‘recollection’. However, newer studies have identified the involvement of adjacent areas like the perirhinal cortex, an area associated with recognition, when things are familiar. Zeman has noted that researchers earlier assumed that déjà vu was a phenomenon of the hippocampus-our brain’s memory data center. The hippocampus and the parahippocampal gyrus, both of which are important in maintaining memory in the human brain, are located in the medial temporal lobe.ĭifferent lobes in the brain (Photo Credit : Sebastian023/Wikimedia Commons) Contemporary studies have even identified specific parts of the medial temporal lobe linked to the occurrence of déjà vu. In the 1970s, a method to artificially induce déjà vu was discovered using electrodes in the medial temporal lobe of the brain. In fact, a study related to déjà vu began as early as the 1950s, wherein researchers tried to find what regions of the brain were responsible for it through electrical stimulation. The difference was minimal, except the higher frequency of occurrence in the case of epileptic patients. The study was conducted by Adam Zeman, a clinical neurologist in the UK, and his team to determine how epileptic déjà vu is different from the usual déjà vu experienced by healthy individuals. For a patient of epilepsy, the feeling of déjà vu could mean that they might begin to lose consciousness. You may even be reading this article, sitting at your house right now, and your brain could suddenly tell you “Hey! I’ve read this article before!” Why does deja vu happen?ĭéjà vu is also associated with the beginning of a seizure in epilepsy. We tend to subtly acknowledge that there’s something a little “off” with this feeling of familiarity.ĭéjà vu is a French phrase that means ‘already seen’. To put it a bit differently, déjà vu is the eerie sense that our present experience is a reminiscence of something that we can’t really figure out. This feeling of being vaguely ‘familiar’ with something that you likely have never seen before is called déjà vu. It can be a bit unnerving, and also fascinating, and almost everyone in the world has felt it at some point, even if they didn’t know the word for it! Even so, there is still a bizarre tickle at the back of your mind, telling you that somehow you are already familiar with the situation before you. This may be something that you’re watching for the first time in your life-even in a place where you have never been. Have you ever experienced the strange feeling when you look at something and think, “Hey! I’ve seen this before it seems”. This explains why we occasionally get a feeling of ‘familiarity’ through déjà vu, but it’s not as tangible as a fully recalled memory. It is generally believed that healthy people get déjà vu due to a memory error evoked by the mismatch between sensory input and memory-recalling output.

Deja vu psychology definitio