RESEARCHERS have been investigating the phenomenon known as Jamais vu a little bit closer.
For decades, the phenomenon of déjà vu has been central to neurological studies.
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The word déjà vu, French for ‘already seen’, describes when a person feels like they have experienced the same exact situation before.
But now, new research has attempted to dive into the phenomomon known as jamais vu.
“The opposite of déjà vu is ‘jamais vu,’ when something you know to be familiar feels unreal or novel in some way,” the team writes for The Conversation.
“In our recent research, which has just won an Ig Nobel award for literature, we investigated the mechanism behind the phenomenon,” they added.
HOW DOES JAMAIS VU WORK
Experience jamais vu could look like a few different scenarios – for example, looking at a familiar face but finding it unusual for a moment.
Or you may experience the phenomenon when going to a known place but becoming slightly disorientated.
“It’s an experience which is even rarer than déjà vu and perhaps even more unusual and unsettling,” the study author’s said.
To look at the phenomenon closer, a team of researchers tried to replicate it in a lab setting.
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“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,” the authors explained.
“They did it with twelve different words which ranged from the commonplace, such as ‘door’, to less common, such as ‘sward’.”
Shortly after, the team asked participants to copy out the word as quickly as possible.
Although, they told them they were allowed to stop if they felt peculiar, bored or their hand hurting.
The results showed that 70 percent of particiaptans stopped because things began to feel strange, or jamais vu.
In a second experiment, the team used only the word “the” and found that 55 percent of people stopped writing because of jamais vu.
They noted that it took around 15 years to write up and publish this scientific work.
“Our unique contribution is the idea that transformations and losses of meaning in repetition are accompanied by a particular feeling – jamais vu,” the team said.
“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.”
