{"id":10232,"date":"2023-10-12T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-12T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/?p=10232"},"modified":"2023-09-27T07:04:15","modified_gmt":"2023-09-27T07:04:15","slug":"jamais-vu-the-science-behind-eerie-opposite-of-deja-vu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/jamais-vu-the-science-behind-eerie-opposite-of-deja-vu\/","title":{"rendered":"Jamais vu: the science behind eerie opposite of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n \n
\n \n Cornelius Krishna Tedjo\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/span>\n <\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n\nAkira O’Connor<\/a>, University of St Andrews<\/a><\/em> and Christopher Moulin<\/a>, Universit\u00e9 Grenoble Alpes (UGA)<\/a><\/em><\/span>\n\n

Repetition has a strange relationship with the mind. Take the experience of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu, when we wrongly believe have experienced a novel situation in the past \u2013 leaving you with an spooky sense of pastness. But we have discovered that d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu is actually a window into the workings of our memory system.<\/p>\n\n

Our research found that the phenomenon arises when the part of the brain which detects familiarity de-synchronises with reality. D\u00e9j\u00e0 vu is the signal which alerts you to this weirdness: it is a type of \u201cfact checking\u201d for the memory system<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

But repetition can do something even more uncanny and unusual. The opposite of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu is \u201cjamais vu\u201d, when something you know to be familiar feels unreal or novel in some way. In our recent research<\/a>, which has just won an Ig Nobel award for literature<\/a>, we investigated the mechanism behind the phenomenon.<\/p>\n\n

Jamais vu may involve looking at a familiar face and finding it suddenly unusual or unknown<\/a>. Musicians have it momentarily \u2013 losing their way in a very familiar passage of music. You may have had it going to a familiar place and becoming disorientated or seeing it with \u201cnew eyes\u201d. <\/p>\n\n

It\u2019s an experience which is even rarer than d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu<\/a> and perhaps even more unusual and unsettling. When you ask people to describe it in questionnaires about experiences in daily life they give accounts like: \u201cWhile writing in my exams, I write a word correctly like \u2018appetite\u2019 but I keep looking at the word over and over again because I have second thoughts that it might be wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

In daily life, it can be provoked by repetition or staring, but it needn\u2019t be. One of us, Akira, has had it driving on the motorway, necessitating that he pull over onto the hard shoulder to allow his unfamiliarity with the pedals and the steering wheel to \u201creset\u201d. Thankfully, in the wild, it\u2019s rare.<\/p>\n\n

Simple set up<\/h2>\n\n

We don\u2019t know much about jamais vu. But we guessed it would be pretty easy to induce in the laboratory. If you just ask someone to repeat something over and over, they often find it becomes meaningless and confusing.<\/p>\n\n

This was the basic design of our experiments on jamais vu. In a first experiment, 94 undergraduates spent their time repeatedly writing the same word. They did it with twelve different words which ranged from the commonplace, such as \u201cdoor\u201d, to less common, such as \u201csward\u201d. <\/p>\n\n

We asked participants to copy out the word as quickly as possible, but told them they were allowed to stop, and gave them a few reasons why they might stop including feeling peculiar, being bored or 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 we defined as jamais vu. This usually occured after about one minute (33 repetitions) \u2013 and typically for familiar words.<\/p>\n\n

In a second experiment we used only the word \u201cthe\u201d, figuring that it was the most common. This time, 55% of people stopped writing for reasons consistent with our definition of jamais vu (but after 27 repetitions). <\/p>\n\n

People described their experiences as ranging from \u201cThey lose their meaning the more you look at them\u201d to \u201cseemed to lose control of hand\u201d and our favourite \u201cit doesn\u2019t seem right, almost looks like it\u2019s not really a word but someone\u2019s tricked me into thinking it is.\u201d <\/p>\n\n

\n \"Image\n
\n Try writing \u2018the\u2019 33 times.<\/span>\n Christopher Moulin<\/span>, CC BY<\/a><\/span>\n <\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n\n

It took us around 15 years to write up and publish this scientific work. In 2003, we were acting on a hunch that people would feel weird while repeatedly writing a word. One of us, Chris, had noticed that the lines he had been asked to repeatedly write as a punishment at secondary school made him feel strange \u2013 as if it weren\u2019t real.<\/p>\n\n

It took 15 years because we weren\u2019t as clever as we thought we were. It wasn\u2019t the novelty that we thought it was. In 1907, one of psychology\u2019s unsung founding figures, Margaret Floy Washburn<\/a>, published an experiment<\/a> with one of her students which showed the \u201closs of associative power\u201d in words that were stared at for three minutes. The words became strange, lost their meaning and became fragmented over time. <\/p>\n\n

We had reinvented the wheel. Such introspective methods and investigations had simply fallen out of favour in psychology. <\/p>\n\n

Deeper insights<\/h2>\n\n

Our unique contribution is the idea that transformations and losses of meaning in repetition are accompanied by a particular feeling \u2013 jamais vu. Jamais vu is a signal to you that something has become too automatic, too fluent, too repetitive. It helps us \u201csnap out\u201d of our current processing, and the feeling of unreality is in fact a reality check. <\/p>\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n

We are only beginning to understand jamais vu. The main scientific account is of \u201csatiation\u201d \u2013 the overloading of a representation until it becomes nonsensical. Related ideas include the \u201cverbal transformation effect\u201d<\/a> whereby repeating a word over and over activates so-called neighbours so that you start off listening to the looped word \u201ctress\u201d over and over, but then listeners report hearing \u201cdress,\u201d \u201cstress,\u201d or \u201cflorist\u201d. <\/p>\n\n

It also seems related to research into obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), which looked at the effect<\/a> of compulsively staring at objects, such as lit gas rings. Like repeatedly writing, the effects are strange and mean that reality begins to slip, but this might help us understand and treat OCD. If repeatedly checking the door is locked makes the task meaningless, it will mean that it is difficult to know if the door is locked, and so a vicious cycle starts.<\/p>\n\n

Ultimately, we are flattered to have been awarded the Ig Nobel prize for literature. The winners of these prizes contribute scientific works which \u201cmake you laugh and then make you think\u201d. Hopefully our work on jamais vu will inspire more research and even greater insights in the near future.\"The<\/p>\n\n

Akira O’Connor<\/a>, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of St Andrews<\/a><\/em> and Christopher Moulin<\/a>, Professor of cognitive neuropsychology, Universit\u00e9 Grenoble Alpes (UGA)<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cornelius Krishna Tedjo\/Shutterstock Akira O’Connor, University of St Andrews and Christopher Moulin, Universit\u00e9 Grenoble Alpes (UGA) Repetition has…\n","protected":false},"author":624,"featured_media":10218,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[1035,1036,563,474],"class_list":{"0":"post-10232","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health-and-body","8":"tag-deja-vu","9":"tag-jamais-vu","10":"tag-psychology","11":"tag-the-conversation","12":"cs-entry","13":"cs-video-wrap"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/624"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10232"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10233,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10232\/revisions\/10233"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}