Scientists have discovered a new brain glitch that is the exact opposite of deja vu.
While deja vu is the unsettling sense that you’ve lived a moment before, jamais vu is when something familiar suddenly feels alien — like encountering it for the very first time.
You’ve likely felt it: walking through your hometown and suddenly feeling lost, or repeating a common word until it sounds strange and meaningless.
Repetition is often the trigger. The brain, overloaded by familiarity, short-circuits, making the ordinary feel bizarre.
It can be brought on by doing the same thing over and over again, or staring at something for too long. But sometimes, researchers say, it strikes without warning.
Psychology professor Dr Akira O’Connor of the University of St Andrews in Scotland, once experienced jamais vu while driving.
All of a sudden, he had to pull over and remind himself how to use the pedals and steering wheel.
He and his colleagues wanted to figure out where this unnerving feeling comes from.
Through two experiments, they found that jamais vu is a signal that something has become too automatic, forcing you to ‘snap out’ of the repetition.
Jamais vu, commonly considered the opposite of deja vu, is when something familiar suddenly feels unfamiliar, as if you have never seen or experienced it before
‘The feeling of unreality is in fact a reality check,’ O’Connor and his colleague Dr Chistopher Moulin, professor of cognitive neuropsychology at Université Grenoble Alpes in France, wrote in The Conversation.
‘It makes sense that this has to happen. Our cognitive systems must stay flexible, allowing us to direct our attention to wherever is needed rather than getting lost in repetitive tasks for too long,’ they added.
In their first experiment, 94 undergraduate students were asked to repeatedly write the same word.
They did this with 12 different words ranging from common terms (like ‘door’) to more uncommon terms (like ‘sward’).
The researchers asked participants to write as quickly as possible, but told them they were allowed to stop if they started feeling strange, got bored or their hand began to hurt.
Roughly 70 percent of participants stopped at least once because they began experiencing jamais vu.
The feeling usually emerged after about one minute of writing, or 33 repetitions, and happened more frequently when the participants were writing familiar words.
The second experiment was essentially the same, except participants were only asked to repeatedly write the word ‘the’ as the researchers assumed it is the most common word.
That time, 55 percent of participants stopped writing because of jamais vu, but it only too 27 repetitions to trigger the feeling.
Writing the same word over and over again can trigger jamais vu
They described their experiences as the words losing their meaning the more they looked at them, feeling like they lost control of their hand, and feeling like the word isn’t really a word, but someone tricked them into thinking it is.
The researchers published their findings in the journal Memory in February, 2020.
Previous studies had also identified this strange brain glitch, but O’Connor, Moulin and their colleagues were the first to link losses of meaning in repetition to a particular feeling — jamais vu.
They believe that its purpose is to snap you back to reality if you become entrenched in a repetitive mental state or behavioral sequence.
There is still a lot that experts do not understand about jamais vu, including the precise neurological mechanism that drives it and its potential association with brain disorders like epilepsy and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).
But at least you can rest assured that this eerie feeling of unfamiliarity is actually just your brain giving you a reality check.
