John Menick

The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating article by Evan Ratliff on one of the more obscure areas of neurology: chronic or pervasive déjà vu, also apparently known as persistent déjà vécu. Among other things, the article describes the experience of one man referred to by his initials A.K.P.:

He refused to read the newspaper or watch television because he said he had seen it before. However, A.K.P. remained insightful about his difficulties: when he said he had seen a program before and his wife asked him what happened next, he replied, “How should I know, I have a memory problem!” The sensation … was extremely prominent when he went for a walk — A.K.P. complained that it was the same bird in the same tree singing the same song … When shopping, A.K.P. would say that it was unnecessary to purchase certain items, because he had bought the item the day before.

Ratliff also gives a brief description of the naming of this “paramnesia” or “phantasm of memory”:

At a scientific meeting in 1896, the neurologist F. L. Arnaud proposed that scientists unify their descriptions under a single term, “déjà vu.” He also recounted the unusual case of Louis, a 34-year-old who had recovered from cerebral malaria. Louis, as the Cambridge psychiatrist German Berrios wrote in a summary of Arnaud’s work, “showed ‘the first symptoms characteristic of déjà vu’ when he started claiming that he could recognize certain newspaper articles that he said he had read previously.” Louis felt that he “recognized” nearly every experience, a sensation he described as “I am living in two parallel years.” Arnaud even took Louis to a funeral (Louis Pasteur’s, as it happened) to see if he would claim to have remembered it. He did.