Mansi, Week 14: Déjà Vu

A familiar sound. A familiar smell. A familiar touch. A familiar sight, but you just can’t quite put your finger on what you’ve been reminded of. The kick? You know you’ve never actually experienced it before. In a few seconds that feeling will pass, and you’ll simply brush it off and move on with your day. But chances are, you’ve just had your taste of déjà vu.


 Déjà vu, according to the Scientific American, is a French term meaning “already seen.” The feeling’s spontaneity, as the article continues, makes it incredibly difficult for the feeling to be studied further, but cognitive psychologist Anne Cleary attempted to recreate the feeling in subjects in her lab by putting them in a certain situation and using things like furniture to stimulate their memory and evoke déjà vu. While she was successful, psychologists wouldn’t only attribute actual experience to sparking the feeling—déjà vu can also be triggered by experiencing something that a person has never actually been through. This feeling can be both reasonable and unreasonable, fueled by either experiencing a situation similar to a situation a person has actually been through before or the medial temporal lobe’s overenthusiasm in memory retrieval, especially prevalent in overexcited young children or older adults whose brains function less efficiently as an effect of aging. Other causes for the feeling could be specifically attributed to dementia, as déjà vu could actually be the feeling of the “recognition of an error,” causing dementia patients to believe they’ve done things before that they actually hadn’t.


However, no matter what causes the peculiar feeling, it’s ultimately an experience that many would describe as both confusing and thrilling, and sometimes even unforgettable. So when will your next encounter with déjà vu be?

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