Dejavnost

Dejavnost is the term used in several Slavic languages to denote the subjective experience known in English as déjà vu: a fleeting sense that the present situation has already been experienced. The concept is closely linked to the French phrase déjà vu, meaning “already seen,” and many languages use a similar construction to describe the phenomenon.

Typical features include a sudden, intense feeling of familiarity, often accompanied by a sense that the moment is repeating or staged. The impression is usually brief, lasting only a few seconds, and does not involve specific memories of a prior event. Dejavnost is common in healthy individuals and can occur in everyday settings, more often when a person is tired, stressed, or absorbing a lot of sensory information.

Prevalence and variation: Most people experience at least occasional déjà vu-like sensations, while persistent or distressing episodes are rarer. In clinical contexts, frequent, prolonged, or distressing episodes may warrant evaluation for temporal lobe epilepsy or other neurological conditions.

Possible mechanisms include a mismatch between perception and memory encoding, generating a sense of familiarity without recall; transient misfiring in memory-related brain regions such as the hippocampus and temporal lobe; or parallel processing that briefly reclassifies the current scene as a memory. The exact cause remains debated, and findings are largely correlative.

Clinical and cultural relevance: While typically benign, dejavnost is of interest to neuroscientists as a window into memory processes. It appears in literature and film as a symbol of unrecollected memory or uncanny recurrence, without implying actual recollection of a past life.