The Replay Button

Thanks to freezing rain during the previous night, the streets in NJ were skating rinks yesterday morning and the trees were encased in sparkling crystal. Unsurprisingly, the weight of the ice brought down tree limbs that severed electrical wires around the state. My power went out at 9 a.m. (I have a well and an oil furnace, so my heat and water go off with it.) I cozied up by the fireplace to wait it out. The outage was minor by the standards of such things. After two hours, JCP&L crews working in the ice reconnected a line somewhere and my lights popped back on. When they did I experienced a momentary sense of déjà vu. This is remarkable only because it has been years since my last sense of it. In my youth it happened with some frequency. This turns out to be normal. In most ways normal human brains hiccup more often as they age, but not in this one. In this one way they get more stable. The decade of life in which healthy people most frequently experience déjà vu is 15-25. Occurrences decline thereafter and all but disappear in seniors in the absence of medical conditions (e.g. epilepsy) or psychoactive drug therapy.

The Britannica Dictionary defines déjà vu as "the feeling that you have already experienced something that is actually happening." (The reverse experience – the feeling that something familiar is strange and alien – is called jamais vu.) There are several non-mutually exclusive explanations for the phenomenon. I choose to discount the paranormal ones though some people do not: an MD in Psychology Today, for one,  writes, “There are situations that are glitches in time when the rules bend and the mystery takes hold.” I think it rather more likely the glitches are in us, not in time.
 
Sometimes we really have a trace memory of something very similar to what we are currently experiencing. This was likely the case yesterday. I’ve sat before many fires in my life, and the woodsy area where I live typically loses power several times per year – usually briefly but sometimes for days. In other cases “dual processing” may be involved. The human brain processes sensory data on multiple levels at once and most of those levels are not conscious. (Hence we usually can navigate across a room successfully even when we are mentally preoccupied and not paying conscious attention.) A time lag can occur between non-conscious apprehension of one’s surroundings and the upload of the same information to our conscious awareness (processed in separate parts of the brain), in which case we may seem to experience an event twice – in a sense we do. The lag is miniscule but apparently noticeable. This can be more pronounced in cases of extended déjà vu called déjà vécu (“already lived”). One elderly British gentlemen with the beginnings of dementia has a chronic case of it; he gave up watching television because he said he always already knew what would happen next. He, of course, could not describe the show before turning it on, so this looks like a processing error rather than paranormal precognition. Another possibility (again, not mutually exclusive with others) has to do with the way we retrieve memories. Our memories are not stored all in one place but are scattered here and there. When we recognize some item as familiar, a mechanism in the hippocampus assembles those other bits and pieces of the memory into a sort of holographic whole. It may be possible, however, for one element to trigger that sense of familiarity even in an otherwise novel environment. Speaking of déjà vu in epileptics in particular, Dr. Alan Brown of Duke University’s Department of Psychology & Neuroscience commented to an interviewer, “My belief is that a pre-seizure déjà vu experience is triggered by spontaneous activity in that area of the brain that handles familiarity evaluations.” This may be the case among neurological normies too.
 
Whatever the real explanation may be, the term “déjà vu” is not appropriately used in the context I’ve heard it twice this morning: with regard to current events. This is a flawed use on many levels, as politically infused terminology usually is. The speakers, of course, meant that history was repeating itself. It isn’t. Max Beerbohm: “History,” it has been said, “does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.” Analogies made by armchair historians always should be treated cautiously, as should “lessons” supposedly drawn from them. As examples, arguably the two World Wars taught opposite lessons. The first was to exercise restraint lest a limited regional dispute spiral out of control: Austria’s problems with Serbia were not worth a world war. The second was to nip aggression in the bud lest it spiral out of control. In truth the two cases were different. The cases are always different.
 
As for current world events, I won’t add to the din of “analyses,” most of which range from bad to very bad. I just know that calling it déjà vu is calling it something it is not. I’ve heard it all before. I’ve heard it all before.
 

John Fogerty - Deja Vu (All Over Again)