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déjà vu
A feeling of having already experienced the present situation.
Examples:
- When I walked into the café and saw him sitting there, I felt a sense of déjà vu, as if I had recognized his face from a previous encounter.
- The strange sense of déjà vu washed over me when I arrived at the party, almost like I had been there before.
prosopagnosia
A cognitive disorder characterized by the inability to recognize faces, even though the ability to see and describe them is intact.
Examples:
- Individuals with prosopagnosia often find it challenging to recognize friends, family, or even themselves in photographs.
- She struggled with prosopagnosia, making social gatherings particularly stressful because she could not easily identify others' faces.
cryptomnesia
The phenomenon where a person mistakenly thinks that a memory they have is an original thought, rather than a recollected experience.
Examples:
- His new song felt familiar to him, and it turned out to be a case of cryptomnesia, where he unknowingly borrowed from a tune he'd heard before.
- The artist faced accusations of plagiarism, but he claimed that it was simply cryptomnesia affecting his memory of earlier works.