These relatives never thought to complain to their doctors about it because they did not think it was abnormal. 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. People with epilepsy can sometimes experience a heightened and extreme feeling of déjà vu at the onset of a seizure. 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. 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.” Why the number of dementia cases has doubled
And when you ask people, about 60 to 70 per cent will say they get it,” he says. Picture: Shutterstockĭéjà 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. Déjà vu is a normal part of how the brain works and is experienced to varying degrees by many people. That abrupt and acute sense of familiarity – however improbable – is a phenomenon known as déjà vu, the French phrase for “already seen”. Do 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?
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