This should not be the first time you have read this post

This post will not be literary although metaphors are needed for scientific enquiry.

We understand the operation of the brain (and by extension the mind) through models of memory. One popular model is that we store our experience of new stimuli in a visuospatial sketchpad, a working memory that lasts for about seven seconds. Imagine remembering that access code sent to your email: you type it perfectly then forget it instantly.

If your experience is novel or essential enough, we might store that in a short-term memory where it will slowly degrade. If we imagine the metaphors of computer storage popular now, then we can liken synaptical storage to the magnetisation of a harddrive. Both will degrade over time. This might be a conversation we have about a project that you know in detail at first, but forget almost entirely a year later.

If we access that short-term memory over several spaced-out times, that information might become encoded into long-term memory. Long-term memory is a stronger synaptical connection that makes the memory less likely to degrade. Models of computers see it as a separate storage space in the brain, something of an external harddrive. Arguably memories stored here are novel or fundamental memories of life experiences.

This model seems to work for most experiences and functions of memory. The cognitive scientists propose versions of this for education and they operate well.

However, memory does not always work like this. Sometimes an experience is instantly encoded into long-term memory at the same time as it is being experienced. The physical sensation of long-term encoding is uncanny, and creates the feeling of deja vu. You physically feel that you have experienced this event before because you are experiencing that event at the instant it happens, and from your long-term memory stores.

While this is just a model, a limited version of reality intended for us to function in the world more effectively, it is a monstrously influential one. The behaviourists, those supremely rich psychologists who plot Facebook algorithms to unsettle us, or to employ new methods of military manipulation, declare their view the only version of reality worth celebrating.

I urge you to read Jung. What we might call ‘genetics’ or ‘DNA’ are all reductionist responses to being human, a quantifiable model of the world that takes one part of reality (that which is outside our heads) and then returns it to us disguised as all of reality, or at least the only part worth talking about.

Deja vu is a spiritual sense as much as a psychological one. It is a patterning of the chaos of life outside our heads. Why do we dream in similar archetypes? Why do we spend our time on prose.com to write scraps of stories for others to experience from across the world? Is it because we know there is more to life than that which the behaviourists tell us?

I hope this is not the first time you have wondered this.