On paradoxical recognition: déjà vu and alienation · June 17th, 2009
This post is another snippet from Memory, where Hunter describes the experience of déjà vu as an episode of illusory recognition involving two features which seem incompatible with each other: a present event is recognised as having been witnessed before, yet there is a certainty that this is impossible.
In this form of self-contradictory recognising, we believe that what we say, do or see has been done before in the same circumstances, and we feel that we know what will happen next, as if we remember something that hasn’t happened yet. The present moment is saturated with recollective familiarity as we experience an intense feeling that everything around us has happened in the same way before, and seems out of hand. The sensation of déjà vu, if not the result of a severe brain dysfunction, is usually short and infrequent, merely causing mild puzzlement over unaccountable familiarity.
The opposite situation is alienation, in which intimately known situations and persons are experienced as being strange and unfamiliar.
Déjà vu may be experienced when we are visiting some town for the first time: despite having never been there, the streets look strangely familiar, the scene we are witnessing is somehow not unexpected. A rational explanation could be that this place shares similar environmental characteristics with another place we remember.
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