Jamais vu: the science behind eerie opposite of déjà vu

• But we have discovered that déjà vu is actually a window into the workings of our memory system.
• Our research found that the phenomenon arises when the part of the brain which detects familiarity de-synchronises with reality.
• Déjà vu is the signal which alerts you to this weirdness: it is a type of “fact checking” for the memory system.
• The opposite of déjà vu is “jamais vu”, when something you know to be familiar feels unreal or novel in some way.

Simple set up

• If you just ask someone to repeat something over and over, they often find it becomes meaningless and confusing.
• 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 “door”, to less common, such as “sward”.
• This time, 55% of people stopped writing for reasons consistent with our definition of jamais vu (but after 27 repetitions).

Deeper insights

• 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.
• Hopefully our work on jamais vu will inspire more research and even greater insights in the near future.
• He gratefully acknowledges the support of the IUF in his research into déjà vu and jamais vu.