Have you ever experienced a mental glitch or a quick flash of some place, situation, or person? For a brief moment, you become convinced you've lived that exact experience before. You pause, search your memory, and wonder where you have seen this situation, place, or person before. That feeling lasts only a few seconds or minutes, but leaves you confused, curious, and even a little unsettled. Many people worry that something is wrong with their memory or that they have forgotten an important event. Good News! Psychology says there is usually nothing to worry about. This fascinating experience is known as Déjà vu.
The feeling is called Déjà vu in psychology. Déjà vu is a French word, suggested by the French philosopher Émile Boirac in 1890, translated as “already seen” in English. This term is used for the feeling or condition in which a person thinks that he/she has already seen the same current situation before. It flashes in the mind for seconds, and the person thinks that he/she is revisiting an old memory or reflecting on an old scene.
What Causes Déjà vu?
The human brain collects memories and stores them much like the function of a computer. Likewise, if it is overloaded by thoughts, talks, or information, it shows an error in memory formation resulting in Déjà vu. The brain creates a collision between recognising a present situation and feeling that it has already experienced it before. This collision occurs because of the partial memory formation of the human brain.
Can Distraction Cause Déjà Vu?
Distraction is also a factor in triggering Déjà vu. If you’re not paying heed to whatever you’re doing at the moment or you’re zoning out while being in a classroom or a lecture, you’ll experience Déjà vu when you return your brain to the current situation. When your attention returns, the brain behaves as if it has already happened in the past for a brief moment, creating the familiar sensation of Déjà vu.
Biological Factors Behind Déjà Vu
The leading biological factors involved in this feeling include stress or fatigue, as they have a prominent effect on memory (both short-term and long-term). Surplus dopamine also causes this weird and mysterious feeling. Any medication, supplement, or factor leading to the surplus release of dopamine in the nervous system disrupts the function of the temporal lobes of the human brain. Since the hippocampus is located in the temporal lobe and plays a role in memory formation, it gets affected by surplus dopamine, resulting in Déjà vu.
Delays in Brain Communication
A feeling of Déjà vu can also result from holdups in transfer between the brain and the sense organs or non-epileptic temporal lobe seizures. The perception that the information being received is out-of-date and that the happenings have already occurred in the past can result from this delay in the transfer of information.
Who Faces Déjà Vu?
Déjà vu is most common in teenagers and young adults (15-25). It is more likely to be observed in people who travel a lot, scroll too many reels, read too much, gain extensive knowledge, and have a strong memory. In all these cases, the human brain gets flooded with information and cannot process it immediately, as processing requires time. As a result, impaired memory formation leads to false memories or Déjà vu. Stress from high-pressure careers or constant public attention can trigger episodes of Déjà vu in some people. The stress might not be severe, but it still affects the human brain, especially the temporal lobe, which has a key role in memory formation.
What Does Déjà Vu Feel Like?
In some cases, Déjà vu feels like visiting one’s own forgotten past. Consider an example: a person visits a place for the first time and everything there seems familiar to him. It feels like he has already been there and known the place for a long time, even though he had never been there before. As soon as he leaves the place, the feeling disappears. However, the environment and people there contained a sense of familiarity for him.
Types of Déjà Vu
Déjà vu is a general term used to capture the effect, including the feeling of having already seen, perceived, described, done, accomplished, thought, felt, endured, smelled, known, found, desired, dreamed, etc. The feeling is the same in all these conditions, no matter in which way you perceive it.
Medical Fact
Epilepsy is a neurological disorder characterised by seizures and blurred vision, as the temporal lobe of the human brain is affected in this condition. Epileptic patients are more likely to experience Déjà vu during attacks. In normal persons, Déjà vu only creates confusion in the mind. However, if a person is experiencing Déjà vu more frequently, he/she should consult a neurologist for inspection of Epilepsy, Schizophrenia, Anxiety, Vascular Dementia, etc.
Déjà vu is a very common phenomenon, and 97% of people have experienced it more or less. Some people experience it more often, while for some people, it happens rarely. Its occurrence depends on different conditions and factors, which are obviously different for everyone. For one brief moment, time cracks open, reality feels constructed, and you catch your own consciousness in the act of being alive.
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