The term déjà vu is dervated by a French term meaning “already seen”. It is used to describe an individual’s feelings when the person visits a place or goes through an experience that brings an overwhelming resemblance to something that the person cannot actually tell about happening in the past. For example, a person from London could visit a royal palace in India and feel as if he had already been there before, even though he had never actually traveled there before. Likewise, one could enjoy a dinner with a group of friends in a restaurant in the city and feel as if he had experienced the exact occasion sometimes, even if it is not.
Connection to other health problems
Scientists have always tried to find links between déjà vu and mental health disorders, in particular dissociative identity disorder, schizophrenia and anxiety disorders. Until now, however, they have failed to find conclusive evidence linking such disturbances to the experiences of déjà vu. However, some links between déjà vu and epilepsy seem to exist. For example, patients with temporal lobe epilepsy have reported feeling similar to déjà vu at the beginning of an epileptic seizure. Scientists have also attempted to link genetic mutations to déjà vu, but have not yet been able to identify a gene that can be clearly associated with this phenomenon. C ‘
Drug related Deja Vu
An interesting case study in 2001 provided more information on the relationship between déjà vu and pharmacological drugs. A healthy man taking amantadine and phenylpropanolamine drugs together experienced frequent episodes of déjà vu. The case study on humans was published by Finnish researchers Taiminen and Jääskeläinen in 2001, who also continued to argue that the dopaminergic action of these drugs, and previous studies by other scientists suggesting links between dopamine and déjà vu, could imply that a hyperdopaminergic event in the brain may be responsible for the déjà vu.
What happens inside the brain?
A section of researchers hypothesizes that the déjà vu occurs due to some form of misalignment or errors in the processing of memory in the brain, in which a confusion in the memory of the brain recalls the capacity and the sensory output translates into this situation. A different kind of hypothesis explains that déjà vu occurs due to an “escape” from our short-term memories in our long-term memories, and our brain thus records our current encounters as a past event of some kind, giving us the typical feeling of already seen. Some studies on epileptic patients have indicated that disorders in the median temporal lobe could induce a déjà vu event.
Role of past dreams
Another very interesting explanation of the occurrence of the events of déjà vu has been linked to dreams. Precognitive dreams, where a future event is dreaming, could trigger déjà vu experiences in a person when the future future of the dream world becomes reality. Since these dreams are usually completely forgotten after awakening, the memory of having an experience similar to what was seen during the dream in a future event could explain the effect of déjà vu.
