• Question: Why do we get de ja-vu? And why does it make you feel like your re living a moment? x

    Asked by caitx to Fiona, Jane, Joanna, Michelle, William on 19 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by charlotte25.
    • Photo: Fiona Randall

      Fiona Randall answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      Hi Caitx, that is a really good question! There has been lots of research done on deja-vu and hallucinations and the 2 are often confused. One type if deja-vu is the result of a medical problem like epilepsy, where a seizure in a specific brain area makes you think you have seen that thing before. However people without any brain problems also get deja-vu, for example, when you walk into a building and feel you have been there before. This is thought to be because one memory you have from a different time is triggered by something in the new place, so the smell or a sound or something, and that makes it seem familiar to you like you have been before. There is still more to understand about deja-vu and scientists are looking for answers in patients with epilepsy that experience deja-vu, as in these patients, knowing where the seizure was they also know which parts of the brain could have triggered the deja-vu. So we learn a lot from studying normal brains and brains of people with brain diseases and comparing them!

    • Photo: Joanna Brooks

      Joanna Brooks answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      Hello again! Well some people think that we get deja vu because the brain tricks the memory system into thinking that we have already seen it – this happens very quickly almost instantly so it’s difficult to control. Have you seen the film The Matrix (1999)? They have deja vu all the time!

    • Photo: Michelle Murphy

      Michelle Murphy answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      déjà vu is french for already seen it can happen for a number of reasons, seizures in the temporal lobe are of the brain or our brain forgetting how to register what happens in the present and past. it is most common in young people 15-20 years old or so.

    • Photo: Jane Henry

      Jane Henry answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      One theory is that these experiences are personally significant but most scientists think its an anomaly of memory and you are mistaken in believing you have experienced the situation before or forgot that you have experienced the same or something very similar on a previous occasion.

    • Photo: William Davies

      William Davies answered on 19 Jun 2010:

      no-one knows for sure. perhaps it’s because you’ve seen a similar scene previously and as your brains recall systems aren’t perfect, it assumes that you’ve seen the current scene before. We know that occasionally the brain makes mistakes when it remembers from various studies in the field of criminology looking at how people remember faces and events at simulated crimes for example.

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