What Causes a Feeling of Sedentousness?

There are a few different ideas about what causes deja vu. The idea that we've been working on in our lab is that there's a set of brain regions in your medial temporal lobe. There are brain regions that signal when we're finding something familiar. Sometimes those brain regions can just signal familiarity in a way that isn't quite right. They're kind of twitching, like your eye might twitch when you're tired. That's when you get this mismatch of familiarity signal and awareness that the familiarity signal is incorrect. So you've got this kind of error correction going on, and that's the feeling of deja vU.