Cause Of Deja Vu

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Have you ever been talking with your friends, or visiting a new restaurant and suddenly felt as if you have experienced this exact moment before? This bizarre sensation of feeling like you have already encountered a specific situation is called déjà vu (Lewis, 2012). In fact, it literally means “already seen” in French. Various reasons explain the cause of déjà vu. First, researchers have related it to the mismatch in the brain as it seeks to form complete perceptions with only minimal inputs. Our brain takes sensory information from our environment to create a memory. Déjà vu could be mix-up between that sensory input and trying to retrieve a memory. Another theory of déjà vu suggests a glitch between our long and short-term memory. As you …show more content…

The experience of déjà vécu incorporates an abundance of detail and people may feel like they are reliving a familiar experience or past memory (Funkhouser, 1996). For example, this might be a time where you sense everything around you is identical to something you have experienced before. Every object and circumstance seems the exact same. An entire sequence of specific events might seem like it has been lived through before. Researchers hypothesized that episodic memories contain the information and the experience of recollection (Ratliff, 2006). The slight amount of consciousness attached to a memory informs us that we that we are recalling a past experience. When you constantly have the feeling of recalling something from your past, but don’t have the feeling of memory information, you experience déjà vécu. It can be serious and some people never clear out the feeling of something already occurring. For instance, a woman who frequently experienced déjà vécu, returned her library card because, to her, it seemed that every book in the library she had already read. Although déjà vécu is the most common and complex type of déjà vu, there are two other ways to classify the familiar

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