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The opposite of Deja Vu exists, it's weird

2023-09-24 18:24:00, Blog CNA

Repetition has a strange relationship with the human mind. For example we take the experience of Deja vu , when we mistakenly believe that we have experienced a new situation in the past, causing in you an eerie feeling of the past. But we have discovered that Deja vu is actually a "window" into the workings of our memory system.

Our latest study found that this phenomenon arises when the part of the brain that detects familiarity de-synchronizes with reality. Deja vu is the signal that warns you about this surprising phenomenon : it is a kind of "fact checker" for the memory system. But repetition can make something even more strange and unusual.

The opposite of DejaVu is "Jamais Vu", when something you know as known is perceived in a moment as not real or even new. Jamais Vu, may involve seeing a familiar face and considering it unusual or unfamiliar. It happens not infrequently to musicians, for example, they forget a very familiar musical passage.

You yourself may have experienced when you went to a familiar place, and at some point you felt disoriented, or you saw it with "new eyes". This experience is even rarer than Déjà Vu and perhaps even more unusual and disturbing.

When you ask people to describe it in questionnaires they say: "When I was writing the word 'appetite' in the exam, I kept looking at it for a few moments as I assumed it might be wrong". We still don't know much about the Jamais Vu phenomenon.

In the first experiment we conducted, 94 students spent time writing the same word over and over again. They did this with 12 different words, which ranged from common ones like "gate" to less common words like "sword."

We then asked participants to copy the word as quickly as possible, but told them they were allowed to stop when they were experiencing a particular feeling, such as boredom or hand fatigue. Stopping the process because things started to be perceived as strange was the most common option chosen by about 70 percent of students.

They stopped at least once because they felt something special, which we defined as "Jamais Vu". This usually happened after about a minute (33 repetitions) - and usually for familiar words. Meanwhile, in a second experiment we used only the English word "the", because it was more common.

This time, 55 percent of the students stopped writing for reasons matching our definition of "Jamais Vu" (but after only 27 repetitions). The young people then described their experiences in a variety of ways, ranging from “losing the meaning of the words as they looked at them written to “we felt like we lost control of our hand”, to the preferred description of us: "It seems like it's a word, but like someone tricked us with it."

It took us about 15 years to write and publish this scientific research. In 1907, one of the founding figures of psychology, Margaret Washburn, published an experiment with one of her students that showed the “loss of associative power” for words that were repeated for 3 minutes.

At some point they became strange, lost their meaning and fragmented over time. Our unique contribution to this study is the idea that transformations and losses of meaning in repetition are accompanied by a special feeling, which is precisely Jamais Vu. By Akira O'Connor & Christopher Moulin “Science Alert”/ Adapted from CNA