Many have experienced a peculiar feeling in their lives, one which causes a situation to feel incredibly familiar while being completely new. This heavily studied experience is called Deja Vu. The literal translation is “already seen,” and is an experience where a person gains a feeling of familiarity in a situation that is completely unfamiliar to them (Barzykowski and Moulin 2022). It is an incredibly complex process, utilizing many different parts of the brain and memory. Déja vu is theorized to have stemmed from a branch of recognition memory.
Recognition memory is the type of memory that allows a person to identify whether the situation they are in is something they have seen before or not. This is the main memory type humans use when remembering names, faces, places, and other things of this sort (Cleary 2008). Familiarity-based recognition memory is the most relevant branch of recognition memory, described as a situation feeling familiar but being a nouvelle experience (Cleary 2008). Many studies from the past have shown that the frequency of travel, dreams, and films watched in a person’s life affects the frequency and intensity of an individual’s feelings of deja vu (Cleary 2008). The most probable explanation for the production of this feeling of familiarity is that the elements that make up a situation trigger moments of past experiences. It can be thought of as an overlap of the known elements and unknown elements, the more overlap between the unknown and known there are, the stronger the feeling of familiarity and therefore there is a higher chance of the proper memory resurfacing. (Cleary 2008).
Scientifically, the parts of the brain most associated with this phenomenon is the hippocampus, which is associated with “episodic memory,” allowing for the remembrance of specific instances and situations, and the cortices (Lisman et al. 2017). Deja vu is medically described as the faulty syncing between cortices and the hippocampus, with the flashes of memory being associated with the hippocampus reassembling previous memories incompletely. It was proved by Penfield, who used electrical stimulation to reproduce this feeling by evoking specific parts of a patient’s memory (Gillinder, Liegeois-Chauvel, and Chauvel 2022).
The existence of deja vu can be hypothesized as a by-product of the modern day human memory system. Being favoured by evolution, this system allows for pertinent information to be remembered even though it has small flaws and glitches in the form of these familiar feelings. This was a better alternative to a system in which these flaws would not exist, but would also result in the loss of important information (Veit and Browning 2023). The feeling of deja vu had little to no impact on organism fitness and survival itself, and is therefore thought of as a small price paid for an expensive system (Veit and Browning 2023). Despite being heavily researched, Deja Vu is thought of as a theory that is still being tested with the intention of finding a universally agreed upon explanation for the mechanisms of this phenomenon.
References
Barzykowski, Krystian, and Chris J. A. Moulin. “Are Involuntary Autobiographical Memory and Déjà vu Natural Products of Memory Retrieval?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46 (January 2023): e356. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X22002035.
Cleary, Anne M. “Recognition Memory, Familiarity, and Déjà vu Experiences.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 17, no. 5 (2008): 353–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2008.00605.x.
Cleary, Anne M., and Alexander B. Claxton. “Déjà Vu: An Illusion of Prediction.” Psychological Science 29, no. 4 (2018): 635–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617743018.
Gillinder, Lisa, Catherine Liegeois-Chauvel, and Patrick Chauvel. “What Déjà vu and the ‘Dreamy State’ Tell Us about Episodic Memory Networks.” Clinical Neurophysiology 136 (April 2022): 173–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clinph.2022.01.126.
Lisman, John, György Buzsáki, Howard Eichenbaum, Lynn Nadel, Charan Ranganath, and A. David Redish. “Viewpoints: How the Hippocampus Contributes to Memory, Navigation and Cognition.” Nature Neuroscience 20, no. 11 (2017): 1434–47. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4661.
Veit, Walter, and Heather Browning. “Evolutionary Mismatch and Anomalies in the Memory System.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46 (January 2023): e381. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X23000183.
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