Ever gone somewhere new, only to have the peculiar feeling that you’ve been there before? You’re not going crazy; it’s just a glitch in the working of your hippocampus, the part of the brain that forms memories of places. Normally, neurons called place cells fire to create a map of any new place we enter. The cells fire again the next time we go there, so we don’t have to get reoriented. Sometimes, though, we enter a space very similar to one we’ve already been in like a generic waiting room and the place cells forming the new memory overlap with those for the familiar site, leading to that eerie feeling.
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