gwax's rumblings

I have at many times in my life had brief, déjà vu like expe­ri­ences. A recent, par­tic­u­larly strong one inspired me to read up on the phe­nom­e­non a bit and men­tion the occur­rences. In read­ing through wikipedia, I came across the sub-categories of déjà vu and was struck by how much déjà senti, or ‘already felt,’ sounds like the phe­nom­e­non that I expe­ri­ence. The sen­sa­tion can be described as an uncanny sense of exactly repeat­ing a psy­cho­log­i­cal or emo­tional state, almost as if some­one had recorded my men­tal state at a time in the past and sud­denly loaded it back into my mind. When this hap­pens there is no inter­me­di­ary rem­i­nis­cence that reminds me of a pre­vi­ous state, just a sud­den shift to the old state. Usually, the phe­nom­e­non is very short lived with an equally abrupt shift back leav­ing me with a strong sense of, “woah, what just hap­pened in my mind?!” It’s a very curi­ous and rather pleas­ant expe­ri­ence, but I find myself won­der­ing if any­one else has had a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence or has them recur­rently, as I do.

Sometimes I am able, after the fact, to recall an instance in which I was in the men­tal state that I shifted to and iden­tify a sim­i­lar­ity to the present, which may be a can­di­date trig­ger stim­u­lus. For exam­ple, the phe­nom­ena appear to have occurred in response to music on a quite a few occa­sions, where a par­tic­u­lar song jumps me into a state that I was in dur­ing a par­tic­u­lar pre­vi­ous time that I lis­tened to that song. These music induced jumps seem to occur more often with some songs than oth­ers but are, by no means, pre­dictable or repeat­able. If such a jump occurs with a given song, it is always to the same state for a given song, which can occa­sion­ally demand press­ing fast for­ward. The times when I am able to iden­tify the trig­ger and orig­i­nal recorded state are the minor­ity; some­times I get one or the other and some­times I get nei­ther. Regardless of how much I am able to con­sciously remem­ber, there is always a strong sense of rec­ol­lec­tion, hence déjà senti.

When I first started to become aware of these déjà senti occur­rences, I fig­ured them for some sort of synes­the­sia, fig­ur­ing that I had some sort of music→emotional cross. This the­ory gained some ground after a dis­cus­sion on the topic of synes­the­sia with my cousin, who has per­fect pitch; sound→color synes­the­sia and perfect-pitch are thought to have pos­si­ble con­nec­tions and genetic trends. However, as I started pay­ing more atten­tion, I came to real­ize that the phe­nom­ena are not iso­lated to audi­tory stim­u­lus and some­times seem to occur with­out any sen­sory stim­u­lus at all. Subsequently, I started con­sid­er­ing the phe­nom­e­non to be a form of déjà vu. Déjà vu being where I left my think­ing until the par­tic­u­larly strong and thor­oughly inex­plic­a­ble occur­rence that led to déjà senti and this post. It feels to me as though my brain may be doing a sim­i­lar thing in the case of déjà senti as in the case of leaps of intu­ition where I am able to feel the answer to a prob­lem long before I can rea­son through the prob­lem. Perhaps the brain is capa­ble of pro­cess­ing infor­ma­tion at a far faster rate than con­scious­ness can fol­low and some­times the brain doesn’t want to wait for con­scious­ness to catch up. Maybe I just need to start giv­ing my brain par­tial credit until it learns how to show its work. Of course, the impa­tient brain the­ory doesn’t explain why some of my end­points are com­plete psychological/emotional states.