August 22, 2016.
You have already seen it. You have already seen it.
This feeling, which seven out of ten people say they have already felt in their life, has long been considered to be a sign of mental fatigue, stress or emotion. The feeling of déjà vu is even part of the diagnostic elements of certain mental pathologies, or psychiatric disorders!
Deja vu, known all over the world
And yet, according to a recent Scottish study, this impression defined for the first time in 1876 by the French philosopher Émile Boirac is in no way a sign of a mental problem, on the contrary!
It would even be a sign of good functioning of the brain, and its system of memorization and validation of memories. To reach this conclusion, researchers at Saint Andrews University in Scotland managed to create a protocol for eliciting deja vu impressions in guinea pigs.
Already seen: it is the memory that sends a signal
By dint of applying this protocol, they came to the conclusion that the guinea pig’s brain was only validating recently acquired memories, triggering this impression, all under MRI. By noting that the prefrontal cortex kicks in in certain situations, and not the hippocampus, as they expected, they were able to validate the hypothesis that it was the areas dedicated to memory and memory processing that triggered deja vu.
And if you no longer get that feeling of déjà vu after having experienced it several times in your life, that’s completely normal. It fades, then disappears, with age …
To find out more: The phenomenon of déjà vu, how does it work?
