ABSTRACT
In the brain, deja vu has long been associated with the temporal lobes. There are sufficient scientific studies to make a concrete proposal about what deja vu is and its basis in the brain. It is a rare occurrence because usually the feeling of familiarity and the retrieval of information work in concert. However, at times, this association between familiarity and prior occurrence breaks down. A cognitive explanation of this breakdown would be that conceptual or perceptual similarity or unattended processing generate a feeling of familiarity (probably through enhanced fluency), whereas a neurological account would be that the familiarity circuit becomes temporally and erroneously activated in the human memory network, for some physiological reason. The two accounts are not mutually exclusive, and deja vu should be thought of as having multiple causality, and different levels of explanation converging on one core symptom.
