Friday 3 April 2009

Déjà vu

This New Scientist article ('Déjà vu: Where fact meets fantasy' by Helen Phillips) is interesting. Apparently only 10% of people claim never to have experienced Déjà vu (I'm one of that ten, actually); whereas for some people, at the other end of the scale, it becomes a veritable psychopathology:
Mr P, an 80-year-old Polish émigré and former engineer, knew he had memory problems, but it was his wife who described it as a permanent sense of déjà vu. He refused to watch TV or read a newspaper, as he claimed to have seen everything before. When he went out walking he said the same birds sang in the same trees and the same cars drove past at the same time every day. His doctor said he should see a memory specialist, but Mr P refused. He was convinced that he had already been.

The article rehearses arguments from brain chemistry to explain this widespread feeling (perhaps it is indeed 'the consequence of a dissociation between familiarity and recall'). But I read the article wondering: could something as banal and everyday as this be behind Nietzsche's unflinching adherence to the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence? (A philosophical slogan: 'Eternal Return, the consequence of a dissociation between familiarity and recall...')

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