Anyone with a modicum of historical and topical awareness may at various moments experience news of current events with a sense of gnawing familiarity. The massacre at Haditha may evoke memories of My Lai. Dick Cheney’s recent criticism of the New York Times and other outlets (for outing the government’s surveillance of banking transactions) may bring to mind another arrogant, media-bashing Vice President, Spiro Agnew. The Bush Administration’s many abuses of power may stir recollections of the Nixon Administration’s. Mr. Bush’s halting and malaprop-laden use of the English language may remind one of…well, the last time he opened his mouth. In short, there are echoes of the past in the present, a kind of déjà vu.

Of course, such perceptual experiences are not déjà vu. They are evocations of historical parallels. Strictly speaking, “the accepted scientific definition of déjà vu, put forth in 1983 by a Seattle-based psychiatrist named Vernon Neppe, is ‘any subjectively inappropriate impression of familiarity of the present experience with an undefined past.’� Periodically, most people experience this sensation of “inappropriate familiarity.� It comes and goes quickly—like the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court—and one is typically aware that the sensation is somehow misplaced. In other words, it does not seem to belong (like American troops in Iraq). Imagine, though, if the feeling of familiarity were not accompanied by the sense of inappropriate belonging, if misplaced recollections were persistently experienced as actual memories. Such a condition—known as déjà vécu (“already lived through�)—is the topic of a fascinating article by Evan Ratliff in today’s New York Times Magazine, of which I offer a very brief excerpt:

Déjà Vu, Again and Again

Pat Shapiro is a vibrant woman of 77, with silver hair, animated blue eyes and a certain air of elegance about her. She lives with her husband, Don, in a white two-story Colonial in Dover, Mass., a picturesque town set on the Charles River east of Boston. After 56 years of marriage, Pat and Don have a playful repartee that borders on “Ozzie and Harriet,” and her still-sharp mind is on display in their running banter. “Don, we haven’t had an ‘icebox’ in years,” she’ll say, interrupting one of his winding stories. “It’s called a refrigerator.”

Her short-term memory isn’t quite what it used to be, she says, but it’s nothing that impacts her life. “Her long-term memory is meticulous,” Don says. “She can remember details from our trips to Europe years ago that I can’t.”

One day last December, however, an odd thing happened to Pat Shapiro. She was sitting in a car outside of a store with her daughter Susan, while another daughter, Allison, shopped inside. From the front seat Pat noticed a woman who seemed intensely familiar getting into a nearby car with a baby. “I saw her last time I was here,” Pat remarked. “That baby did that exact same thing.”

Looking up, Susan thought the comment strange; it seemed odd even that her mother had been to this store recently. Then Pat noticed another woman, smoking and chatting on a cellphone. “There’s that woman who was smoking a cigarette, with the scarf on,” she said.

This time, Susan protested. “Ma, the chances of the other woman, who doesn’t know that woman, coming to the parking lot, smoking a cigarette —”

“No, they were there last time,” Pat insisted. She couldn’t place when exactly she’d been there before, but she felt positive she’d seen the women.

Allison returned, and as they left, Pat noticed two nuns on the sidewalk. They, too, she said, had certainly been there before.

“Mom, are you O.K.?” Susan asked.

“I feel fine,” Pat replied.

Worried, Susan called her father later that day and asked if Pat had ever claimed to recognize strange people or places. “Oh, it happens every once in a while,” he said. Susan asked if the episodes bothered him. “Only when she is determined to make me think that something has gone on that way,” he said.

Later, though, Pat admitted to Susan that she was having such experiences frequently. As often as several times a day, in fact, she was struck with what sounded to Susan like an intense sensation of déjà vu, a familiarity with a place or situation that — logically, at least — she couldn’t have encountered before. She would claim to recognize details of restaurants she’d never been to, and occasionally greeted total strangers as if she’d met them before. To Pat, in such moments, the familiarity didn’t feel like déjà vu. It just felt like a memory. Like reality. more…