Have you ever felt like you have experienced things before? Sometimes people perceive their situation as having been experienced and this happens from various situations, even from a simple situation as being in an elevator while feeling something similar to one’s past.

Déjà vu is a fleeting sensation of having already lived in a totally different situation at some point in the past. The word Déjà vu is a French word, meaning “already seen”. However, despite the meaning of the word itself, Déjà vu is a false sense of familiarity. It is caused by the fact that the brain creates a sensation as if you have been in a certain situation before, which in fact you have not experienced. Now that the memory is not coming exactly from the brain itself, it is not easy to identify the actual situation.

When you are feeling Déjà vu, you might be feeling as if you are in a conversation, feeling the sensation that you have had before. In this situation, you might also be able to predict what the person is going to say next. For example, when you are in an elevator and someone comes in and talks to you, you might feel that you have experienced the same scene before, even though you don’t remember the exact same scene with the same person, same scent, or same atmosphere.

What causes Déjà vu to happen? A neurologist Jean Jhoury, MD explains that it is caused by dysfunctional connections between the parts of the brain that play a role in memory recollection. In this case, the line between the memory from the past and a new experience can be blurred due to a miscommunication between two parts of the brain. Specifically, the one part

By Jeonghwa Oh