Wait...Have I Been Here Before? The Neuroscience Behind Déja Vù
Mary Casey HST 401 Professor Horgan 30 April 2026 Wait…Have I Been Here Before? The Neuroscience Behind Déja Vù Introduction It’s Wednesday, and you’re sitting in your 11 am class zoning in and out of the professor’s lecture. Suddenly, you feel that something is…off. The professor says something in a certain tone, someone laughs a certain way, and someone else sneezes, all in that order. For a moment you freeze. Wait. I’ve been in this exact moment before . It’s hard to explain when or where, but it feels completely real. You feel you know what happens next. The next thing you know, the feeling is gone. Such an experience is known as déja vù, French for “already seen.” It is something that most people, around 60-80%, experience at least once in their lifetime (Labate et al., 2018). Although it lasts only a few seconds, it raises the interesting question: why does my brain sometimes feel like it remembers something, something that never even happened in the first place? Rese...