MYSTERY OF DÉJÀ VU

If you're deep in conversation with a friend and you suddenly get the feeling you've already had it before, even though you know that you haven't, it means you are experiencing a déjà vu.

Déjà vu is the French word for “already seen”. It describes the strange experience of a situation feeling much more familiar than it should. It isn’t a Matrix’s mistake or a memory that comes from parallel universes, past lives or something seen in a dream. Déjà vu is a physical phenomenon caused by the presence of a particular anomaly in the morphology of the brain.

Rif. Pixabay

What we know so far is that in people who haven’t experienced psychosis or temporal lobe epilepsy, there could be two causes of déjà vu. The “Attentional explanations”, which begins with an initial perception are made under low attention span, followed by full attention. For example, if you are about to unlock the front door of your house and you’re momentarily distracted by a noise, when you return to the task of unlocking the door, the first perception may seem further off in the past.

The second theory called “Memory explanations” makes the assumption that some details of the new experience is familiar but the source of this familiarity has been forgotten. The premise of this explanation is that people encounter countless things during the course of a day but they don’t pay attention to all the information. Later reprocessing that information may occasionally induce familiarity and déjà vu, but it is also recognised as a kind of epilepsy in the temporal lobe.

For epileptic patients, déjà vu might be a sign that they are about to have an epileptic fit.

Many studies and polls have been made

about this phenome

non. To find an answer, researchers of the NRC (National Research Council) decided to compare the brain activity of Rif. Pixabay

63 epilepsy-suffering people with 39 healthy people. All of them have experienced déjà vu at least once in their life.

The results proved that both healthy people and epileptic patients show anomalies but in different areas of the brain.

There is another experience worth mentioning: Jamais Vu, the opposite of déjà vu. Instead of a situation feeling familiar, it seems totally unfamiliar. In this case there is little connection between long-term memory and perceptions of the present. So when you are in the state of Jamais vu, nothing you are experiencing seems to have anything to do with the past. You might be talking to a person you know well and suddenly the person seems totally unfamiliar and everything seems new.

Claudio Gaudiano 4BS Nicola Gaudiano 4BS Maria Teresa Maffei 4BS Rossana Miglionico 4BS Aurora Sassone 4CS Nunzia Scasciamacchia 4AC