Why do we get a déjà vu?

The most common misuse of the term déjà vu seems to be with precognitive experiences-- experiences where someone gets a feeling that they know exactly what's going to happen next, and it does. An important distinction is that déjà vu is experienced during an event, not before. read more

Perhaps we smell something familiar, for example, and our mind is instantly transported to the first time we smelled it. (It's a vague theory, though, and doesn't explain why most déjà vu episodes don't reflect true past events.) Déjà vu may be a fleeting malfunctioning between the long- and short-term circuits in the brain. read more

It has been proposed that déjà vu could be triggered by a similar neurological discharge, resulting in a strange sense of familiarity. Some researchers argue that the type of déjà vu experienced by temporal lobe epilepsy patients is different from typical déjà vu. read more