deja vu and temporal lobe disorders

[mckitterick]

Okay, this freaks me out a little and might explain a lot about how my brain works. stuology posted a link to this How Stuff Works article on the deja vu phenomenon.

This line made me think: "Déjà vu has been firmly associated with temporal-lobe epilepsy. Reportedly, déjà vu can occur just prior to a temporal-lobe epileptic attack." When I was in the 15-25 age range that they say is the most common age for people to experience deja vu, I used to have it happen all the time. It would usually happen during a very stressful moment, as in arguing with my (first) ex-wife, approaching an accident, engaging in a fight with someone, or so on. I would be able to see - literally, visualize - and hear what was about to happen, sometimes just before it happened, seconds in advance... and when I would disobey the future deja-vu vision, things would progress differently.

It was especially helpful during those very stressful moments, because I could select the least-damaging or most-positive path to pursue. Oddly, not saying or doing anything at that moment usually led to the best outcome.

Similarly, I've always had a tenuous grasp on time-understanding, at least in a linear sense. I tend to think of time in, well, circles or spheres that move out from an event or duty or personal interaction, and things move "outward" from that, either into the past or future. Unless I set my alarm or Outlook reminders, I will often not remember to do something, unless it's related to one of those time-loci. I often forget to eat or go to sleep or whatever unless reminded, and I don't consider myself absent-minded; it's just that if there isn't some solid referent to time in my sense of it, I have difficulty placing it into a memorable context. Even things I care about or are important to me!

And this goes well beyond remembering things. I perceive of time in ways that confuse people when I try to describe it. I write science fiction which often deals with time in some way, I guess in a way to try to understand it. I feel a lot of satisfaction, a lot of euphoria, when reading, say, astrophysics or history books, because I begin to understand the universe better and am able to better place myself within the context of other events, like visualizing one's self on a 3-dimensional map or seeing one's house from Google Earth.

So these things have gotten me wondering... do I have some kind of brain disorder, something about my temporal lobe bordering on epilepsy, as they say? But without the seizures?

I can see how my deja-vu experiences when I could "see the future" could perhaps have been little seizures happening during major stresses, and I would perceive of time "backwards" during the incident. So the future was actually the past, but I was dislocated from it perceptually.

Have any of you experienced this?

The brain is a fascinating thing.

Best,
Chris

Comments

[geekmom.livejournal.com]

I've had deja vu a lot, especially in that age range, but mine was more the classical sense of experiencing something very familiar or swearing that I dreamed the experience. I remember the first time it happened I was in grade school, and I thought it meant that I had ESP. These days, I think I just had a hiccup in brain chemestry, because there weren't any points where I actually shared a dream with someone else before re-experiencing it.

My understanding is that temporal lobe seizures don't always cause convulsions or loss of awareness. They can often be the weird emotional alien abduction/haunted irrational feelings, hallucinations, deja vu, etc. There are a lot of skeptics who think that many "paranormal" phenomenon are just undiagnosed temporal lobe seizures.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

That makes a lot of sense about "paranormal" experiences.

i love wikipedia

[themitigator.livejournal.com]

Get this:

"The most likely candidate for explanation is that déjà vu is not an act of "precognition" or "prophecy" but is actually an anomaly of memory; it is the impression that an experience is "being recalled" which is false...However there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that déjà vu is at least sometimes associated with genuine precognition, which the memory anomaly theory does not account for."

So your brain thinks it's remembering the past, but really it's just recording a new memory. You remember the memory even as your brain is creating it, and your cognitive understanding lags behind and gets confused.

This doesn't really get into precognitive dreams, but that happens to me all the time. Anyone else?

Re: i love wikipedia

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Cool. I have had such dreams as well, and I wonder how that works. I'll wake up knowing what's going to happen, and it does (unless I act in a way inconsistent with the dream)... so is that time-dislocation or freakish memory-creation?

Like I said, I love the oddities of the brain.

[jamer-31.livejournal.com]

i very often can walk into someplace i have never been and i know i have been there before. i can point out where something is or what will happen next in the room ect.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

...and I wonder how that works!

[kalimeg.livejournal.com]

I've had many different sorts of deja vu, including dreams that played out later, and spots that made me feel lost in time and space until reality snapped back in.

Once it happened on the way to the Oread Shop -- it was definitely a scent that triggered that one, throwing me elsewhere momentarily.

Sometimes I have been in a place and suddenly I identify the scene as belonging somewhere else. It casues momentary confusion, to say the least.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Scents, yes, those are some of the strongest ties to memory. I wonder how many deja-vu experiences are linked to memory?

[amjhawk.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've known you to have a brain disorder for some time.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Um... bite me?

[professormass.livejournal.com]

I'd just say you were psychic, and be done with it.

But I'm a simple person. And I've seen one too many instances of things I consider genuine prescience to doubt its existence.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Well, okay, I'll grant that, but what does that mean? How do you describe, "psychic"? How do you measure, test for, or repeat it?

[professormass.livejournal.com]

Generally? I don't. It's not that important to me.

However, when I've experienced something that felt different, I've usually written it down. I learn to recognize the texture of the feelings that come true. And then only write those down. I check them later, to see if they come true.

This is only useful with specific stuff, obviously. "You will meet a tall, dark stranger" is not what I'm talking about. "Your friend, Bob, whom you haven't seen in fifteen years will be crossing the street across from your house sometime in winter." That's the sort of thing I mean.

So far? Doing pretty good with that.

[kijjohnson.livejournal.com]

between 14 and 25 I had a lot of trouble knowing whether something had happened or whether I had just dreamed it. Sometimes it was neither real nor a dream, but something that I was going to have dreamed about (or done) in the future, only I was "remembering" the dream (which I wasn't sure wasn't real) from the wrong side of time.

God, that didn't make any sense. It wasn't until this moment, reading what you wrote here, that I realized the deja vu thing skipped backward and forward in time.

The mind is awesome but sort of scary.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

That's fascinating. Hm. I wonder why there hasn't been a lot of serious research done on deja vu if so many people experience it and it might be linked to physical processes in the brain.

[roya-spirit.livejournal.com]

Hasn't it been just recently that there were articles describing how the Near Death Experience can be triggered through stimulation of some part of the brain?

all that aside, I think time isn't linear at all, it's just the way our tiny brain capacity can fathom it.