Q: Almost everyone has experienced this and for some it happens often. To some it’s troubling and others think of it as a gift. What is it?
A: Déjà vu. That feeling that you’ve seen or experienced this before.
“Déjà vu is a false sense of familiarity,” says neurologist Jean Khoury, MD. “Your brain creates a sensation as if you’ve been in a certain situation before, but you haven’t. So, you’re unable to retrieve it from your memory and can’t identify the actual situation.”
In other words, it happens when there’s a miscommunication between two parts of your brain: The one responsible for memories (your temporal lobe) and the one responsible for taking in new information ( your hippocampus).
Though researchers aren’t exactly sure why, some suggest you may be more susceptible to déjà vu if you have a higher level of education, travel a lot, and remember your dreams.