It’s an eerie feeling. When you step into a place you know you’ve never been before, the feeling of familiarity overwhelms you. Has all this happened before?
Most people experience this feeling, known as déjà vu, at some point in their lives. But it’s hard to study, scientists say, because it occurs naturally and tends to be easily shaken off.
Nevertheless, scientists believe that déjà vu actually gives us a glimpse of how our memory system works when it’s a little out of whack. This feeling can occur when parts of the brain are improperly activated, says Akira Robert O’Connor, a cognitive psychologist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland who studies déjà vu. . When this happens, another area of the brain matches this familiarity with recollections of past experiences. When no real match is found, the result is the discomfort of having seen everything before and the knowledge of not yet.
“You get this: ‘Huh, weird, all these experiences I’m having don’t quite match.’ At that stage, you realize you’ve made a mistake.” ‘ says O’Connor.
In some dementia patients, this sense of familiarity occurs without any recognition of error, he says. Or you may refuse to go to the doctor because you’re so sure you already have it, and work as if you’ve actually seen it all.
Deja vu means “already seen” in French, and French philosopher Emile Boirac said, French and foreign philosophical reviews Boirac speculated that a long-forgotten residue of perception might have caused the emotion. There is now some experimental evidence that vague similarities between one scene and another can actually lead to a sense of déjà vu. Ann Cleary, cognitive psychologist at Colorado State University and her colleagues developed a way to stimulate it in a laboratory by showing participants virtual scenes that had subtle similarities to each other, such as the arrangement of furniture relative to a painting on a wall. In a 2009 study, researchers found that secretly watching similar scenes was more likely to trigger feelings of déjà vu than watching dissimilar scenes. ” Even scenes you have never seen before.
Cleary’s research shows that slight familiarity can trigger a sense of déjà vu, but it’s not clear that true familiarity is required to initiate that feeling. “This kind of idea makes a lot of sense,” he says O’Connor.
In cases of spontaneous déjà vu, he says, it’s quite possible that the familiarity is random. According to O’Connor, the part of the brain that senses familiarity, the medial temporal lobe, is located just behind the temples and plays a major role in encoding and retrieving memories, but it’s also overused for no apparent reason. may ignite. Supporting this random misfire hypothesis is the fact that younger people actually experience déjà vu more than older people. Younger brains are a little more excitable, O’Connor said, and they tend to fire faster than they repress.
Chris Moulin, a cognitive neuropsychologist at the University of Grenoble-Alpes in France who has studied déjà vu, says that older people are also more likely to be affected by the fact-checker’s ability to create the false feeling of familiarity. He said it could go down. The brain’s fact-checker is located in the frontal cortex behind the forehead. In older people, this area is less likely to put the brakes on false familiarity.
Older people still perceive such false familiarity. “It’s not that older people don’t create false familiarity,” says Moulin. “They’re just no longer convinced that what they’re going through is wrong.”
This is a normal part of aging and not the confusion between déjà vu and reality that someone with dementia might experience. , Gen Z.
