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21 years
Do déjà vu have a medical explanation?
Jun 5, 2013

Dr. Zakia Dimassi Pediatrics
Here's a good reference to read about this phenomenon: <http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201001/what-is-d-j-vu&gt;
Medically speaking, deja vu can be associated with a particular type of epilepsy (mesial temporal lobe epilepsy) due to the brain location of the disturbance, the temporal role, whose functions (among others) include the retention of visual memories, processing sensory input, emotion, and making sense of whatever input it receives.
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Dr. Rania Mousa General Medicine
Because déjà vu is common in normal, healthy individuals, many researchers can only speculate how and why it happens. Some psychiatrists believe that déjà vu is merely a mix-up of the brain’s ability to distinguish the present from the past. This memory anomaly (or Associative Déjà Vu) gives the brain a false impression of the experience being recalled instead of recorded. This is also why an “unsettling” feeling accompanies the familiarity the brain knows of the impossibility of the situation previously occurring.
Often, the subject forgets the specific circumstances in which déjà vu took place, but is still left with the feeling of the experience.
some researches said that Déjà vu is a feeling of familiarity created by the source memory of a similar situation that occurred previously.
We are not so good at retrieving a memory based just on the configuration of objects,If you are in a place that has some unfamiliar objects, but they are set up similarly to a situation you have experienced before, you will get a feeling of knowing, but you won’t actually retrieve any specific memory for the place… If the configuration is nearly identical to one that you experienced before, though, then you may get a powerful feeling of knowing. That is, you may get a sensation of déjà vu. In the end, though, the experience of déjà vu is just an extreme reaction of the system that your memory uses to tell you that you are in a familiar situation.”
ASSOCIATIONS WITH MEDICAL DISORDERS
Biological Déjà Vu, on the other hand, has been associated with epilepsy in the temporal lobe, occurring right before, or even during, a seizure of the temporal lobe. The temporal lobe is the region in the brain where memory is stored. Though this seizure in the temporal lobe doesn’t happen in healthy adults, the same regions are most likely involved in cases of déjà vu.
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