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>> "Thoughts And Deja Vu" <<
by -> Gaurdian
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The person whom I was responding to was of the mindset that deja vu
was a sort of 'memory of the soul,' a recollection of past life experiences.
Obviously I think this is just bullshit. Although the effects of one's
existance continue to propagate through the Universe long after death, the
odds that such effects could be realized electrochemically as conscious
memories is too insignificant to be worth considering.
I present another perspective. Everyone has experienced a type of
reverse remembering that is essentially identical to deja vu on paper. When
you listen to someone you aren't interested in drone on fairly repetitavely,
in terms of intonation, you listen, but you don't hear words. You're aware
that the sound is continuing to exist but that's all. And then, suddenly,
he or she says your name. Boom. The last 5 seconds of whatever was said
come back. You didn't hear them before, but the sudden shock of recognition
jarred the sounds back into you mind, and you decoded the sounds into words,
after the fact. You remember hearding the words now, but you one second ago
you didn't remember hearding them. The conscious memory was created several
seconds AFTER the event was processed by the brain. The same thing can
happen in the physical-visual world as well, although on an even deeper
level.
You're doing something, probably walking, or wandering in a crowd.
These sort of primal actions, such as movement in a large group of people,
or explorative wandering require incredibly little thought. They, in fact,
tend to blank the mind of thought in general. Hence, incidentally, the term
"driving hypnosis," whereby semi-trailer truck drivers often mow down little
cars because they simply aren't sufficiently aware of their surroundings
when they notice that they are close to a collision.
Anyway, it frequently happens that people are in just such a
non-thinking mode and suddenly something happens that SNAPS their mind into
a more lucid mode of thought. Suddenly POW you rethink the last 5 seconds
and re-attribute the decoded meaning of your actions to whatever it was that
you were aware of. Now, when I say "meaning," I don't mean deep,
philosophical, religious crap. I mean the way you interpret an event. The
action of brushing your teeth, for example, is EXTREMELY complex, and
involves hundreds of muscles, and a multitude of balancing acts. And yet
the brain manages to group it into a single event. "Brushing teeth."
Amazing...!
But I digress... back to the SNAP. Now, when you rethink an event,
one that you've already thought through on an unconscious level, you will
percieve a strange sense that you've "done" this before, when in fact it's
not the DOING that's been done before, but the THINKING that's been done
before. This certainly accounts for the situations under which people
experience deja vu. I have never known anyone to have a deja vu experience
while in a lucid state of consciousness. I suppose the 'spiritualist'
could claim that this is because you must be in touch with your
subconscious mind in order to access the memories of your soul? I think
most people can see that such an assertion would just be an attempt to patch
a flawed theory to fit the facts. Oh well.
There is another, far far less common type double memory, where you
actually do something twice, and upon doing it the second time, you remember
doing it the first time. This can only be considered deja vu however if you
can't remember when you did it the first time, or can't remember the
circumstances or some such thing. But it's a far less interesting
phenomenon... more accurately described as a crappy memory.
-=GAURDIAN SIGNS OFF=-
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* (c) HoE publications. HoE #148 -- written by Gaurdian -- 12/12/97 *