Deja Vu--a phenomenon where an individual feels like they have seen something or done something before even though they know they haven’t.
Translated literally from French it means ‘already seen’.
But how does this happen? Well, different parts of your brain control different things, and when the part that relates to the feeling of familiarity gets activated incorrectly. Once that part gets activated, another part verifies its familiarity with memories, and when it finds that there’s no actual match, there’s this feeling of deja vu. Here, your brain has actually avoided an error by realizing that there is no actual match, but you get the feeling that there has been an error in that you remember the feeling but it never actually happened to you.
Although deja vu is an uncommon occurrence, it actually happens much more frequently in patients with neurological disorders, like dementia. In dementia patients, their brains actually don’t catch the error, so they never realize that it has never happened before. For instance, seeing a familiar TV show that they have never actually seen before, they wouldn’t realize they never saw it before. Rather, they would believe that they have seen this show before multiple times (even though they haven’t).
Deja vu is quite spontaneous, and could be sparked by familiarity but also not. When it's spontaneous, the medial temporal lobe (responsible for this familiar feeling and in encoding and retrieving memories) may just send an overenthusiastic signal for no reason, prompting deja vu. Furthermore, younger brains are more likely to do something like that, which may explain why younger people experience more deja vu than older people (also, older brains aren’t as good at fact checking these familiar feelings).
Translated literally from French it means ‘already seen’.
But how does this happen? Well, different parts of your brain control different things, and when the part that relates to the feeling of familiarity gets activated incorrectly. Once that part gets activated, another part verifies its familiarity with memories, and when it finds that there’s no actual match, there’s this feeling of deja vu. Here, your brain has actually avoided an error by realizing that there is no actual match, but you get the feeling that there has been an error in that you remember the feeling but it never actually happened to you.
Although deja vu is an uncommon occurrence, it actually happens much more frequently in patients with neurological disorders, like dementia. In dementia patients, their brains actually don’t catch the error, so they never realize that it has never happened before. For instance, seeing a familiar TV show that they have never actually seen before, they wouldn’t realize they never saw it before. Rather, they would believe that they have seen this show before multiple times (even though they haven’t).
Deja vu is quite spontaneous, and could be sparked by familiarity but also not. When it's spontaneous, the medial temporal lobe (responsible for this familiar feeling and in encoding and retrieving memories) may just send an overenthusiastic signal for no reason, prompting deja vu. Furthermore, younger brains are more likely to do something like that, which may explain why younger people experience more deja vu than older people (also, older brains aren’t as good at fact checking these familiar feelings).
