“He’d completely recovered, and there was no visible clue, but my student just knew he had been in an accident. The student had recently met a friend that she hadn’t seen in a while, and thought immediately he had been in a car accident. Professor Howe decided to look closely at this confounding feeling when a student approached him with a strange experience she described as a sixth sense. “These are rather ill-defined terms, and they are not scientific, but a lot of people use them to mean that they sense something going on, although they can’t see it or describe it,” he says. These relatives never thought to complain to their doctors about it because they did not think it was abnormal.Īssociate Professor Piers Howe, in the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, links déjà vu to the feeling of having a “sixth sense”. Professor Berkovic says déjà vu is considered so normal that when he and his PhD student Dr Piero Perucca studied relatives of people with a mild form of epilepsy, they found that they experienced an increased frequency of intense déjà vu that could be considered epileptic. “But it could be that similar discharges can evoke the same feelings.” “We don’t really know why it happens in healthy people because we’ve never stuck electrodes in the brains of healthy people,” he adds. Scientists have actually stimulated that part of the brain in patients with epilepsy to replicate those intense feelings of déjà vu. They are absolutely convinced that they are experiencing something that’s happened before,” says Professor Berkovic. This is often an indication of a discharge in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the temporal lobe and the part of the brain beneath the temples that controls memory.īut the déjà vu experienced by a person with epilepsy is longer and more intense than so-called physiological déjà vu, or everyday déjà vu in people without epilepsy. People with epilepsy can sometimes experience a heightened and extreme feeling of déjà vu at the onset of a seizure. Professor Berkovic says researchers have learned a lot about how the brain works by studying patients who have epileptic seizures, which occur when there’s an abnormal electrical discharge in part of the brain. Some researchers attribute it to discrepancies or errors in parts of the brain that control memory. The ephemeral nature of déjà vu makes it hard to study, so scientists aren’t exactly sure what causes it. You kind of shake your head and say, ‘Oh, it’s my brain playing tricks on me’, which is exactly what it is.” And when you ask people, about 60 to 70 per cent will say they get it,” he says. That abrupt and acute sense of familiarity – however improbable – is a phenomenon known as déjà vu, the French phrase for “already seen”.ĭéjà vu feels so strange and uncanny that popular culture has associated it with everything from time travel to glitches in “The Matrix”.īut déjà vu is not a sign that you can see into your past life or travel to an alternate dimension, it’s part of how the brain works, says Professor Sam Berkovic, a clinical neurologist and director of the Epilepsy Research Centre at Austin Health. doi: 10.1111/j. you ever get that peculiar feeling that what you’re doing or seeing has already happened, even when you’re pretty sure it hasn’t? Current Directions in Psychological Science. Intense and recurrent déjà vu experiences related to amantadine and phenylpropanolamine in a healthy male. Feel Like You’ve Been Here Before? It Might Be Déjà Vu. Deja vu: what it is, when it may be cause for concern. Unveiling the mystery of déjà vu: the structural anatomy of déjà vu.

Digging into déjà vu: recent research on possible mechanisms. Déjà experiences in temporal lobe epilepsy. Illman NA, Butler CR, Souchay C, Moulin CJA. Vlasov PN, Chervyakov AV, Gnezditskii VV. Many faces of déjà vu: a narrative review. Bošnjak Pašić M, Horvat Velić E, Fotak L, et al.

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