For all you people out there that’ve suffered through my untutored theory that the simplest mechanism explaining deja vu is a mental trick that, rather than creating a memory, only recreates the feeling of having one, might find this NYT Magazine article entertaining. In examining the case of people who have deja vu frequently–almost constantly–it surveys a lot of research over the past three decades. One theory they cover points to an area of the hippocampus that psychologists believe creates the “feeling of recollection” that we feel when remembering some real-life event from our past. It seems like this area fire up and create that feeling even when we are not recalling a previous memory, creating a feeling of a past recollection, when in fact we’re only recalling the present.
So it’s possible that I’m more-or-less-kinda-sorta-maybe right; now I can only hope that I actually remember having said conversation with somebody, instead of only thinking I remember it…
Plus, it has the word “anosagnosic” in it. You don’t get that often.
I WAS WRONG WRONG WRONG
“Joker” is by the Steve Miller Band, from way back in the day. I swore up and down that it was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and drunkenly promised that I would get up on the Intarweb and prove it. Well, I proved only that I am a jackass. Casey, you were right. My bad.
Finally, for everybody out there too lazy to be bothered with keeping track of world happenings that affect you, the Times has a interesting Cliff Notes version of the Supreme Court session this year. Not encouraging, but not as bad as it might have been. Kennedy seems to be leaning a little more liberal to balance out the big dose of right that Busholeum added to the court.
