It's funny what some people think blind people can't do. I can understand people being sceptical about us running a four-minute mile or performing brain surgery, but it hadn't struck me until this morning that there were certain things we weren't supposed to think. But apparently the accepted scientific explanation for that spooky feeling that what's just happened to you has happened, in precisely the same form, somewhere before, has a visual trigger. It was caused, scientists believed, by your eyes sending signals to your brain at slightly differing speeds, so that by the time your brain had clocked a ray of sun falling on a weasel in a particularly engaging way, coming from your right eye, there was another theatrically lit weasel coming along from the left, causing you to exclaim: "Blimey, I know I've seen a sunlit weasel like that in a former life."

So convinced were they that they decided to patent the idea for sighted people by calling it "déjà vu", thus safely locking blind people out of the experience. But how, then, do I explain the fact that I seemed to spend most of my childhood with the distinct impression that I was listening to a tape-recording of my life? I was constantly brought up short by the feeling that I'd heard a phrase before, spoken by the same person, and even that I knew what they were going to say next.

Is the answer that I have one slowcoach ear? Or should the scientists have been calling it "déjà entendu" after all? At last they've caught up. Two psychologists at Leeds University have found a blind man who felt a bit weird when he undid the zip of his jacket and simultaneously heard a certain piece of music. I'm surprised it took a research grant, though; why not just go to a convention of piano tuners and whistle?

· Peter White is the BBC's disability correspondent.