David Bennett wrote:
> Ahhh. . . this is starting to sound familiar! The explanation
> I'm vaguely remembering (or maybe just dreamt, or experienced in a
> previous life) also had a temporal component to it. That is,
phenomonologically
> you think that you have experienced the same event twice separated by some
> significant amount of time, but really you have experienced it twice, but
> almost at the same time. . . with just enough time to drive your
perception
> that it has happened "before."
This is sounding like the "wild guess" I've been giving students in
response to their questions about Deja vu. The experience is dominated by
the feeling that one has been here/seen this before but with no idea when.
Notice how different that is from a normal memory, which is "time-stamped".
But of course by the time you become consciously aware of your surroundings,
you HAVE been there before - an instant before, when the perception itself
was taking place. Awareness is (in a sense) always memory. If you
temporarily lose the "time stamp" that normally goes with memory, you have
deja vu.
Of course, that's just a wild guess with no support whatsoever. But I kinda
like it. Another version would look like this: according to the standard
model of memory, information comes to STM (and therefore awareness) from
both the LTM and the sensory memories. The information coming from the
sensory memories is always about things that happened some fraction of a
second ago, so doesn't need to come with additional information about the
time of the remembered experience. Of course information from LTM DOES need
that information, because facts (etc.) in LTM come from all sort of times in
the past.
If somehow the input from sensory memory were to be experienced as having
come from LTM, one would expect that dominant confusion over the time when
the experience had previously occurred.
(gee, that sounds terribly new-agey, and more than a bit like I'm confusing
a label for an explanation. Oh well...to quote Arlo Guthrie, "I know there
folks out there who think about this kind of thing, and I just wanted you to
know I'm with you")
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
