When I was younger, I often experienced feelings of déjà vu, but it’s been a long time since it’s happened to me.
“Déjà vu” is, of course, the overwhelming feeling that you’re seeing something that you’ve seen before, even though you couldn’t possibly have seen it before. The words are French and translate to: “already seen.”
The last time it happened to me was maybe 40 years ago, and it caused me to slam on the brakes — literally. I was driving with my wife through an east-coast neighborhood neither of us had ever been to. We were a thousand miles from home, and yet as we passed a small older house with an ivy-covered stone wall to the side of a driveway leading down to a sunken one-car garage, I hit the brakes.
“I’ve seen this house before,” I said.
“What do you mean, you’ve seen it?” my wife asked. “You mean you’ve seen one like it? Or pictures of it?”
“No, this very house. With that garage. And that stone wall. And the ivy—everything. I’m sure I’ve seen it before.”
I sat and stared at the house, certain that I could park the car, knock on the door, and lead the occupants on a tour of their own house — although for some reason I couldn’t picture who the occupants might be. It was just the house that I recognized. Could I have lived there in a former life?
“It’s just déjà vu,” my wife said after we had sat still and stared long enough for someone inside to start dialing the police. “Let’s go.”
I drove on, and that was it. My last brush with déjà vu, decades ago.
And I kind of miss it.
Scientists disagree about why something like déjà vu happens. Some think it’s an improper electrical discharge in the brain, sort of like the jolt you sometimes feel at the moment of falling asleep, leaving you teetering between real life and dream life.
Others believe that it’s a momentary delay in how information is processed by two different hemispheres of the brain. If the processing from the two hemispheres is off by even a millisecond or two, the temporal lobe can read one signal as a “real-time” event, while the other signal is considered a “memory” that is identical.
Still, none of that seems to answer the question of why I’ve gone pretty much deja-vu dead in the water. For some reason my déjà vu “rerun circuits” have jammed. Everything I’ve been seeing lately for the first time is exactly as new to me as it should be.
But sadly, I’m reaching that age where some of the “new” stuff I’m seeing shouldn’t really seem new to me at all. Sometimes it takes a while for me to get around to: “Oh, yeah. I remember what my phone number is now. That other number I’ve been dialing is my Social Security number. I think.”
It turns out there’s even a name for that “senior moment” phenomenon. It’s called “jamais vu,” French for “never seen,” and it describes the experience of not recognizing some experience that should be familiar to you. For example, imagine showing a picture of your youngest granddaughter to a friend and saying, “Her name is…u-m-m…”
…which has never happened to me, I swear! (I love you, Olivia! I would never forget your name, not even for a moment!)
There’s also a phenomenon called “presque vu,” which translates to “almost seen.” It’s the intense feeling of being on the brink of a powerful insight without actually achieving the revelation, leaving you with a frustrating, tantalizing feeling of incompleteness. For example, imagine a columnist sitting down certain that he is about to write a brilliant, insightful column, but ending up hammering out the sort of tripe that you’re reading now. I can only imagine how frustrating that would be for a writer. (That’s never happened to me either, I swear!)
Or the phenomenon called “deja entendu,” which translates to “already heard” — the sensation that what you’re hearing now is exactly like something you’ve heard before. Sort of like listening to rap music, in which one rap song sounds exactly as stupid and repetitious as every other rap song you’ve ever heard. (That one I get!)
But these mysterious mental experiences (déjà vu, jamais vu, presque vu and deja entendu) all add up to one unmistakable and unarguable conclusion: The French are weird. Who else would spend so much time obsessing over brains that have become unstuck in time?
Still, I guess we can’t blame them, because you don’t have to be French to experience at least one of these phenomena. According to a 2004 study, about two-thirds of all people have experienced déjà vu.
I know I have, but not in a long time.
And to tell the truth, I sort of miss it. After all, the passage of time is normally so relentlessly predictable, it’s sort of cool to have a moment every now and then that turns time on its head, isn’t it? It makes for a nice little break in the day.
Sadly, it hasn’t happened to me in quite a while, but I still have hope that someday I’ll feel that cool little hiccup in time once again.
Maybe it will happen to me again yesterday.
Or maybe it happened to me tomorrow.
