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Why Do We Have Déjà vu?

Why Do We Have Déjà vu?

Déjà vu OMTimes

Have you ever experienced a feeling of Déjà vu?

What is Déjà vu and Why Do We Experience It?

OMTimes Digital eZineDéjà vu is a French expression, which means “already seen, “It is commonly used to indicate a phenomenon that happens in the brain. The term was used for the first time by Emile Boirac, a researcher of psychological phenomena.

It is a word also used in the manuals of neurology, psychology, and biology, assuming several meanings. However, there are different dubious theories, such as those of past lives, supernatural appearances, and common sense, that appear to mystify the phenomenon.

So Déjà vu is when we feel something for the first time, and we have the sensation of having already seen or experienced that sensation before, or rather, it is a replay of some scene or moment, but that never happened.

Déjà vu arises when a specific memory, for some unknown reason, goes to memory in the long run, without passing through the memory in the short term. Some scientists believe that this phenomenon is triggered by a neurochemical action in the brain, which is not connected to any past experience.

Freud’s explanations help us understand Déjà vu, he states: “All phenomena within the psyche are determined, that is, as long as we investigate, we will find the cause of associations. External phenomena, on the other hand, are a mixture of other causes and accidents. In other words, what happens outside of us will not necessarily mean anything. ”

These assumptions confirm the explanation that Déjà vu manifests itself in a psychological reaction to the transmission of ideas that we have been in those places before, that we have already seen those people, but not knowing for sure where, how and when we live in such a situation. Freud sums up: “In succinct terms, Déjà vu’s feeling corresponds to the memory of an unconscious fantasy.”

Thus, psychoanalysis understands that Déjà Vu is that content which is felt by consciousness, which is an unconscious content that, at another moment, passed through knowledge in a dream or in daily fantasy. Because of repression, content is no longer available to knowledge, except when it happens.



Déjà vu occurs in about 60% of the world population, as a vision of the future, since the phenomenon occurs only in exact moments, and never in previous situations, that lasts from 10 to 30 seconds and soon submerge.

One example is the 23-year-old British man who has experienced episodes of déjà vu for eight years, a frequency that has intrigued scientists. The researchers doubt that the problem has been triggered by excessive anxiety. The young man had to avoid watching television, listening to the radio and reading newspapers, because he always had the feeling of having lived those stories before.

At last Déjà vu is an experience based on the various types of memory, such as direct memory, a short memory that lasts a few hours and mind of the near future, lasting for months or even years, thus giving the sensation that the fact already occurred earlier.

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To understand the functioning of déjà-vu, researchers at the University of St. Andrews in Great Britain decided to proceed with a groundbreaking experiment in trying to “provoke” this sensation of replay in the laboratory. After all, in a typical situation, there is no way to predict when the Déjà vu sensation will occur, which made it difficult for scientists to analyze the brain reactions involved in the process

To the surprise of the researchers, the brain mapping of the participants showed that déjà-vu sensation activated the frontal areas of the brain, which are areas involved in the decision-making process. Initially, they anticipated that regions associated with memory, such as the hippocampus, would be activated with the Deja vu. But that did not happen.

This means that the phenomenon is not a replay, but the brain showing that the “memory check” system is working well and that you are unlikely to forget something or confuse past events.



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