Thursday, June 28, 2012

Psychopharmoc* (for Psychopharmac*)

I sat down to write today’s post about the anniversary of the patent of the saxophone, when I was hit by a sudden sense of déjà vu. Had the blog addressed this already? Most likely – I began my library career cataloguing music materials, and I know I came across the typo saxaphone rather frequently. So I did a quick search: not only had we blogged about the sax before, but I was even the one to do it. Well, that explains my déjà vu! Normally, though, that disquieting feeling goes unsolved, and it’s eerie enough to have inspired an inverted boomerang roller coaster at Six Flags. Déjà vu might be explained by parapsychology, where the “already seen” feeling is the result of precognition, or in which we remember our past lives. I’m still hoping my past self was a wealthy pirate, and the moments I have of déjà visite (“already visited”) are leading me to buried treasure. Sadly, I’ve never experienced any déjà vu surrounding lottery numbers, so that precognition theory is out. Certain medical aspects can be the culprit as well. The sensation tends to come on before a temporal-lobe seizure, and certain drug interactions can cause déjà vu from a psychopharmacological perspective. Now there’s a word that is giving me no blogging flashbacks: the typo psychopharmocology (for psychopharmacology) is a low probability error, occurring only three times in the OhioLink catalogue.

(Image of the Déjà Vu coaster courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Leanne Olson

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