Jamais vu, a phenomenon where familiar things feel unfamiliar or novel, has long been studied in the field of psychology. While déjà vu, which involves feeling like we’ve experienced something before when we haven’t, is well understood as a memory system glitch, jamais vu remains poorly understood.
Researchers have discovered that jamais vu may arise when our brain’s familiarity detector becomes desynchronized with reality. This “signal” alerts us to the weirdness, essentially serving as a fact-check for our memory system. However, repetition can induce something even more unusual: jamais vu.
Unlike déjà vu, which is relatively common, jamais vu is much rarer and often unsettling. People may describe feeling disoriented or seeing familiar things with “new eyes.” Jamais vu can be triggered by repetition or staring, but it doesn’t always require it.
To study jamais vu, researchers used a simple setup: asking participants to repeat the same word multiple times until they felt strange. The results showed that most people (around 70%) stopped writing due to feelings of jamais vu after around one minute and typically with familiar words.
In another experiment, researchers found that people described experiencing jamais vu as feeling like the words lost their meaning or became fragmented over time. This phenomenon is closely related to “satiation” – when a representation becomes overloaded until it becomes nonsensical.
Further research suggests that jamais vu may be linked to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and other conditions where repetitive behaviors become meaningless. The study of jamais vu can provide insights into our cognitive systems and help us better understand why we need to stay flexible and focused in repetitive tasks.
The researchers behind the study are flattered to have won an Ig Nobel prize for their work, which aims to inspire further research and understanding of this mysterious phenomenon.
Source: https://www.sciencealert.com/the-opposite-of-dj-vu-exists-and-is-even-more-uncanny