Déjà vu and the Brain

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UGH! I Just Got the Creepiest Feeling That I Have Been Here Before: Déjà vu and the Brain, Consciousness and Self

We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally,, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time - of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances - of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remember it! (Dickens in David Copperfield - chapter 39 (1))

It happens to me and it has probably happened to you. It is sudden and fleeting, leaving as unexpectedly as it came. While the experience is striking in its clarity and detail, it is difficult to recapture or recount. Generally, it is left unexplained and is described in a vague sense, often simply as, "Wow, I just got the strangest déjà vu." Because it is so difficult to research and seems to have no deleterious effects on daily and long-term nervous system function, déjà vu has been left largely to the wayside of neurobiological investigation. In all of its ambiguity, déjà vu is still a perplexing phenomenon that has not yet been fully explained. The value of truly understanding the source of déjà vu and its circuitry is in uncovering one of the many keys to the role of the conscious self in the functioning of the brain.

What is déjà vu and how does it work? Déjà vu is considered a common phenomenon. Surveys show that about one third of the population has had the most common form of déjà vu sensations (1). Due to the subjective and often indescribable nature of the associated feelings, it has been difficult, to determine who is actually experiencing déjà vu. In general, however, déjà vu is "any number of hard-to-explain sometimes upsetting occurrences of unexpected recognition, in which the person involved has trouble identifying an antecedent for the events and/or places which seem so strangely and intensely familiar (1)." Déjà vu has been defined as "familiarity without awareness (13)." While the situational cues of a déjà vu are familiar, there is a definite lack of awareness about the specific source of the memory.

Arthur Funkhouser (1) defines three types of déjà vu in an attempt to more clearly delineate between associated, but different, neurological experiences. These are déjà vecu (already experienced), déjà senti (already felt) and déjà visité (already visited).

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