Neuroscientists have studied the phenomenon of deja vu

Perhaps the most well-known phenomenon of the human mind is a deja vu - a manifestation of the false memory associated with feelings of recurring events that do not have a real basis. Because of the difficulty of the mental state of play, it remained, by and large, unexplored. Scientists from the University of Western Ontario (University of Western Ontario) in their study shed light on the origin of this mental state.

They succeeded thanks to the observation of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy, for which the deja vu is a possible symptom of impending attack. To study the mechanisms that explain psychic phenomenon, the researchers have made tests for the identification of feelings familiar - the emotional state that appears when the recognition of the event or experience that is characteristic of deja vu. For example, one of the tasks of different types of conflict provoked memories of the subject.

The results showed that in the human brain, which is experiencing déjà vu as a symptom, there are characteristic differences. Only in patients with documented cases investigated state before the onset of a seizure memory impairment were associated specifically with a sense of familiarity, while the subjects in the control group due to epilepsy similar problems were much more varied.

Grätzel is valuable not only because it helps to better explain the laws of manifestation of mental phenomenon psychological and neural levels, but also has clinical significance in the surgical treatment of temporal lobe epilepsy. More results of the survey can be found in the online edition of the journal Neuropsychologia.