14 DAY TRIAL // It's like you have seen this face, this body before...Too much porn with the advancing age does not help...
That's d?j? vu, when new situations seem familiar and it's a memory failure, linked to the activity in one of its relatively small nuclei, called the hippocampus.
A new research has identified a small chunk of it, named the dentate gyrus, to be behind the "episodic memories", data that allows us to tell similar places and situations apart.
"The finding helps explain where d?j? vu originates in the brain, and why it happens more frequently with increasing age and with brain-disease patients", said MIT neuroscientist Susumu Tonegawa.
The dentate gyrus makes the difference in a situation's pattern (it's visual, audio, smell, time and other cues) for future reference, so the researchers tested what happens when this area is impaired. When Tonegawa's team bred mice lacking a fully-functional dentate gyrus, the animals found it impossible to tell the difference between two similar but different situations.
"These animals normally have a distinct ability to distinguish between situations, like humans. But without the dentate gyrus they were very mixed up." said Tonegawa.
"D?j? vu is a memory problem occurring when our brains struggle to tell the difference between two extremely similar situations. As people age, d?j?-vu-like confusion happens more often-and it also happens in people suffering from brain diseases like Alzheimer's. It's not surprising, when you consider the fact that there's a loss of or damage to cells in the dentate gyrus." explained Tonegawa.
Tonegawa explained that he personally, as an aging researcher, already experiences the d?j? vu situations: "I do a lot of traveling so I show up in brand new airports, and my brain tells me it's been here before. But the rest of my brain knows better." he said.