Sunday, July 22, 2007

DEJA VU

Have you ever experienced Deja Vu? I do occasionally, but I have had a real interesting experience the past 24 hours. I think what may have initiated it was an old PC game that I downloaded and started to play yesterday morning (Saturday.)

The other day I was thinking about some cool old games I used to play on the PC and started looking for some online to download (abandonware, etc.) I saw the game Blade Runner and downloaded it the other day. I wasn't sure if it would even play on my Vista-based PC, but I tried it. It installed fine and I fired it up. Well, that started bringing back memories of playing this game. As I played it, I would here dialog from the game and it sounded very familiar. It got to a point that I felt like I was having Deja Vu.

Well, even after I stopped playing the game, I kept having Deja Vu-like feelings. All day long and even in the evening at work. Not constantly, but it would happen for extended periods (anywhere from 2 minutes at a time to 30 minutes at a time.) It was very weird, but really cool. It felt almost surreal. It was mainly based on things I heard or thoughts I had... not necessarily entire events or even being able to predict what would happen next. Almost every thought I had felt like a Deja Vu experience.

I decided to look up some information about Deja Vu online. It appears there is not a lot of research conducted on it, but may be related to certain brain activity. Some descriptions seem to point to déjà senti aswhat I experienced:

This phenomenon specifies something 'already felt.' Unlike the implied precognition of déjà vécu, déjà senti is primarily or even exclusively a mental happening, has no precognitive aspects, and rarely if ever remains in the afflicted person's memory afterwards.

Dr. John Hughlings Jackson recorded the words of one of his patients who suffered from temporal lobe or psychomotor epilepsy in an 1889 paper:

What is occupying the attention is what has occupied it before, and indeed has been familiar, but has been for a time forgotten, and now is recovered with a slight sense of satisfaction as if it had been sought for. ... At the same time, or ... more accurately in immediate sequence, I am dimly aware that the recollection is fictitious and my state abnormal. The recollection is always started by another person's voice, or by my own verbalized thought, or by what I am reading and mentally verbalize; and I think that during the abnormal state I generally verbalize some such phrase of simple recognition as 'Oh yes – I see', 'Of course – I remember', but a minute or two later I can recollect neither the words nor the verbalized thought which gave rise to the recollection. I only find strongly that they resemble what I have felt before under similar abnormal conditions.

As with Dr. Jackson's patient, some temporal-lobe epileptics may experience this phenomenon.

Further research point to other things it could be (but I certainly hope not) including: simple partial seizures, meningitis, brain tumors, and other frightening things. I hope it's just a minor imbalance or old long-term memories mixing with short-term memories or something.

Have any of you ever had extended Deja Vu experiences in a 24 hour period?

4 comments:

OCD.Like.Monica said...

I have experience deja vu and I'll admit that the strange feeling in my head was a lot (I mean, A LOT) like when I am about to have a seziure (the onset of one) and much like the partial seziure that I had. Hmm... maybe there is something to that. You know, game playing is also linked with seizures because your eyes have to move around so much and your brain gets overstimulated (I think that is the reason).

BigTex71 said...

It's very strange... it's still happening again tonight.

OCD.Like.Monica said...

It could be your mind playing tricks on you because you haven't had enough sleep.

BigTex71 said...

It happened a little tonight again. It seems to be tailing off. I slept good yesterday, maybe that helps.