[imagesource:linkedin/mindsjournal]

Everyone is familiar with deja vu, that feeling that you’ve experienced something before. It’s more common than we think and often leaves us a little perplexed.

Science has however come up with a good explanation for this phenomenon, explaining that deja vu happens when the part of the brain which detects familiarity temporarily goes out of sync with reality. Deja vu is your brain fact-checking your memory.

It’s all got to do with repetition as your brain tries to make sense of your surroundings. But as weird as deja vu can be, it’s opposite is sometimes even stranger.

Called jamais vu, when something you know to be familiar feels unreal or novel in some way.

Jamais vu may involve looking at a familiar face and finding it suddenly unusual or unfamiliar. Musicians often experience this when losing their way in a very familiar passage of music. You might even have had it going to a familiar place and becoming disorientated or seeing it with ‘new eyes’.

When you ask people to describe it in questionnaires about experiences in daily life they give accounts like: “While writing in my exams, I write a word correctly like ‘appetite’ but I keep looking at the word over and over again because I have second thoughts that it might be wrong.”

Recent research, which won an Ig Nobel award for literature, investigated the mechanism behind the phenomenon. Ironically, one of the researchers was prompted after experiencing jamais vu themselves while driving. For a brief moment, they ‘became unfamiliar’ with the vehicle’s steering and pedals, and had to pull over to allow their mind to ‘reset’.

In daily life, it can be provoked by repetition or staring, and with this in mind, tests were conducted in a controlled environment where people repeated something over and over, until it became ‘meaningless and confusing’.

Ninety-four undergraduates spent their time repeatedly writing the same word. They did it with twelve different words which ranged from the commonplace, such as “door”, to less common, such as “sward”. Participants were asked to copy out the words as quickly as possible, but told to stop when they began to feel either “peculiar, bored or felt their hand hurting”.

Stopping because things began to “feel strange” was the most common option chosen, with about 70% stopping at least once for feeling something researchers defined as jamais vu. This usually occurred after about one minute (33 repetitions) – and typically for familiar words.

In a second experiment, researchers used only the word “the”, figuring that it was the most common. This time, 55% of people stopped writing for reasons consistent with the definition of jamais vu (after 27 repetitions).

People described their experiences as ranging from “They lose their meaning the more you look at them” to “seemed to lose control of hand” and our favourite “it doesn’t seem right, almost looks like it’s not really a word but someone’s tricked me into thinking it is.”

It took around 15 years to write up and publish the scientific work, so it took some exploring before the researchers were sure that jamais vu actually was ‘a thing’.

In 1907, one of psychology’s founding figures, Margaret Floy Washburn, published an experiment with one of her students which showed the “loss of associative power” in words that were stared at for three minutes. The words became strange, lost their meaning and became fragmented over time.

Jamais vu is a signal to you that something has become too automatic, too fluent, too repetitive. It helps us “snap out” of our current processing, and the feeling of unreality is in fact a reality check.

Scientists now hope this could give better insight into obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), where repeated actions are often a symptom.

Jamais vu doesn’t occur as frequently as deja vu, and it doesn’t really affect those it happens to. But it is a nice word to throw around at your next cocktail party.

[source:ifls]