The worst thing about researching or writing about déjà vu? The jokes. “It’s f*&#ing terrible,” Chris Moulin said when I asked him about the barrage of déjà vu humor faced by any scientist who decides to tackle it as a serious scientific topic. Even I’ve pretty much heard them all over the last couple of months, including from the British customs agent who asked me what my purpose was in the country
“I’m here interviewing a scientist about déjà vu.”
“Déjà vu, eh?” Pause. “Haven’t I seen you here before?”
And then, of course, there is the forever-quoted line from Yogi Berra, “it’s like déjà vu all over again,” and the use of the term to describe anything familiar. Try doing a Google search on it, you’ll get a sense of the frustration that Moulin described to me:
“I get the Google alerts, ‘déjà vu all over again, Yankees beat Red Sox,’” he said. “In Medline or Pubmed, it’s things like ‘Phsophorization and Myelination: Déjà Vu All Over Again.’ It must be hilarious in biochemistry.” Perhaps most frustrating from a scientific perspective, he pointed out, “is that it’s not even bloody déjà vu!”
I should post this twice, just to drive home the point. But you get the idea.
Posted at 8:57 am | Filed under Deja vu, New York Times, Recent stories |
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Let me guess…It’s almost like you’ve read this before : Atavistic on
December 1st, 2007 4:02 am
[...] Let me guess…It’s almost like you’ve read this before [...]
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