Do You Get Déjà Vu?
Amid the hustle and bustle of student life, it’s not uncommon for our human memories to fail us from time to time. We tend to overlook homework, memos, and the like. Being forgetful, in general, is a defining characteristic of us students. However, maybe you, my dear reader, actually find yourself remembering more than usual. Perhaps you have been asking yourself any of these questions:
Have I been here before?
Have I seen this before?
Have I heard this before?
(Or, any other question involving having previously experienced something.)
If you have been having these thoughts, do not fret! You, dear reader, are not going through premature symptoms of epilepsy (or some other medical condition)—instead, you might just have a mild case of déjà vu!
Many strange sensations can cause one to ask: “Why is this so familiar?” One of these is a phenomenon scientists call “déjà vu,” which is French for “already seen.” Most, if not all of us, have gone through the sensation of having experienced something a second time, whether in the middle of doing something or when first entering a room. Usually, déjà vu is triggered by our five senses, but it is mostly sights, smells, or sounds. Although our brain may be aware that this sensation is false, we still question ourselves when something from the “past” is exactly replicated in front of us.
Defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as both “the illusion of remembering scenes and events when experienced for the first time” and “a feeling that one has seen or heard something before,” déjà vu is most often made confusing because we know this “memory” is not true and that we are only experiencing that occurrence for the first time. Interestingly enough, déjà vu has many other subterms, including déjà entendu (already heard), déjà fait (already done), and déjà rêvé (already dreamed)—evidence of the many ways déjà vu is experienced by many of us.
Many scientists have theorized about the reason behind déjà vu, as no official cause has been agreed on yet. Some consider it a malfunction between the temporal lobe of the brain, the part in charge of storing memories, and the hippocampus, which is responsible for storing and processing short-term memories. This association between déjà vu and the temporal lobe could be supported by the experiences of people with epilepsy; sometimes, people who have temporal lobe epilepsy experience déjà vu before having a seizure. However, most of the time, déjà vu is not linked to any medical condition. It could just be the result of inattentiveness, a forgotten memory, or a minor mishap in the nervous system that triggers a sensation of familiarity without retrieving a specific memory.
Although we may not know for sure why déjà vu happens, it definitely is an interesting phenomenon to think about. This peculiar event that happens to each one of us is merely one of the many mysteries of the human mind—most of which have yet to be solved.
