- 1. Accidental activation of the brain
- 2. Memory malfunction
- 3. Double processing
- 4. Memories from wrong sources
Deja vu is the French term that literally means already seen . This term is used to designate that feeling that the person has to have lived that exact moment he is going through or to feel that a strange place is familiar, for example.
It is that strange feeling in which the person thinks " I have lived this situation before ." It is as if that moment had already been lived before it actually happened.
However, although it is a relatively common sensation for all people, there is still no single scientific explanation to justify why it happens. This is because deja vu is a quick event and it happens without any warning sign, being difficult to study. However, there are some theories that, although they may be somewhat complex, can justify deja vu :
1. Accidental activation of the brain
In this theory, the assumption that the brain has two processes when observing a familiar scene is used. For this, the brain looks in all memories for something that is similar, and then, if it identifies, another area of the brain warns that it is a similar situation.
However, this process can go wrong and the brain may end up indicating that a situation is similar to another that has already been experienced, when in fact it is not.
2. Memory malfunction
This is one of the oldest theories, in which researchers believe that the brain skips short-term memories, immediately arriving at the oldest memories, confusing them and making us believe that the most recent memories, which may still be being built on the moment we are living in, they are older, creating the feeling that we have lived the situation before.
3. Double processing
This theory is related to the way the brain usually processes the information that arrives from the senses. In normal situations, the temporal lobe of the left hemisphere separates and analyzes the information that reaches the brain and then sends it to the right hemisphere, which information then returns to the left hemisphere.
Thus, each piece of information passes through the left side of the brain twice. When this second passage takes longer to happen, the brain may have a harder time processing information, thinking it is a memory from the past.
4. Memories from wrong sources
Our brains hold vivid memories from a variety of sources, such as daily life, movies we watch or books we read in the past. Thus, this theory proposes that when a deja vu happens, the brain is actually identifying a situation similar to something we watch or read, mistaking it for something that actually happened in real life.
