The Opposite of ‘Déjà Vu’ is Even More Disconcerting

Déjà vu is a phenomenon many of us have encountered before, often popularized in songs by artists like Beyoncé and Olivia Rodrigo.

It’s that peculiar sensation of feeling like you’ve already experienced a current situation, which occurs when a part of our brain that detects familiarity falls out of sync with reality.

But did you know there’s an opposite phenomenon to déjà vu? It’s called “jamais vu.”

Jamais vu involves feeling unfamiliar with something that should be very familiar to you. It’s even rarer than déjà vu and can feel more unsettling. This concept was explored in Ig Nobel award-winning research for literature conducted by Christopher Moulin, Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychology at Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), and Akira O’Connor, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of St Andrews. They shared their findings in “The Conversation.”

Examples given by Professor Moulin and O’Connor include looking at a familiar object and suddenly finding it unknown or visiting a familiar place but seeing it with “new eyes.” Another instance is writing a word correctly but doubting its correctness upon repeated scrutiny.

In their experiment, the researchers had 94 undergraduates repeatedly write the same word—ranging from common to uncommon—as quickly as they could.

Participants had various reasons they might stop writing, such as boredom or an achy hand. However, the most popular reason, chosen by 70% of participants, was due to feeling strange, a state defined as experiencing jamais vu.

For familiar words, this feeling typically emerged after about one minute (33 repetitions). In a follow-up experiment, participants repeatedly wrote the word “the.” Here, 55% of participants stopped after 27 repetitions due to jamais vu feelings.

Like déjà vu, jamais vu is challenging to articulate. Participants described how words began to lose meaning the more they looked at them, how they lost control of their hands, or how the words simply did not look right.

This isn’t the first time jamais vu has been the subject of an experiment. In 1907, Margaret Floy Washburn and one of her students found that staring at words for three minutes leads to a “loss of associative power.”

Both Professor Moulin and O’Connor noted that jamais vu “helps us ‘snap out’ of our current processing, and the feeling of unreality is, in fact, a reality check.”

“It makes sense this has to happen. Our cognitive systems must stay flexible, allowing us to direct our attention wherever it is needed rather than getting lost in repetitive tasks for too long.”

So, who’s going to write a hit song about jamais vu?

Source: The Conversation, Université Grenoble Alpes, University of St Andrews