The mind’s relationship with repetition is peculiar. Consider déjà vu, the sensation of experiencing a new situation as if it were familiar, leaving us with an eerie sense of familiarity.
However, research reveals that déjà vu provides insight into our memory system’s functioning. Our study shows that this phenomenon occurs when the brain’s familiarity detection mechanism becomes out of sync with reality. Déjà vu serves as a signal alerting us to this anomaly, acting as a form of “fact-checking” for memory.
Yet, repetition can lead to even more uncanny experiences. The opposite of déjà vu, known as “jamais vu,” occurs when something familiar feels unreal or novel. In our recent research, which received an Ig Nobel award for literature, we delved into the mechanism behind this phenomenon.
Jamais vu may involve perceiving a familiar face as suddenly strange or unknown. Musicians may experience it momentarily, losing their way in a familiar piece of music. People might encounter it when visiting a familiar place and feeling disoriented, seeing it with fresh eyes.
This experience is rarer than déjà vu and perhaps even more unsettling. Descriptions of jamais vu in daily life include experiences like second-guessing the correctness of a familiar word while writing an exam.
In daily life, jamais vu can be triggered by repetition or intense focus, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. One of us experienced it while driving on the motorway, necessitating a pause to reset familiarity with the pedals and steering wheel. Fortunately, such experiences are rare in everyday situations.
Although much remains unknown about jamais vu, we speculated that inducing it in a laboratory setting would be relatively straightforward. In our experiments, participants repeatedly wrote the same word until it became meaningless and confusing.
In the first experiment, undergraduates repeatedly wrote twelve different words, ranging from common to uncommon. The most common reason for stopping was the onset of jamais vu, occurring after about one minute of repetition.
In a subsequent experiment using only the word “the,” over half of the participants stopped due to jamais vu after a certain number of repetitions. Their experiences ranged from feeling that the words lost their meaning to losing control over their hand movements.
Our research took around 15 years to complete and publish. It stemmed from a hunch one of us had in 2003, inspired by personal experiences of feeling strange while repeatedly writing lines as a punishment in school.
However, we later discovered that similar experiments had been conducted as early as 1907, suggesting that the phenomenon wasn’t as novel as we initially thought. Our contribution lies in linking the transformation and loss of meaning in repetition to the specific feeling of jamais vu.
Jamais vu serves as a signal that a task has become too automatic or repetitive, prompting us to reassess our current processing. This feeling of unreality acts as a reality check, ensuring that our cognitive systems remain flexible and adaptable.
While our understanding of jamais vu is still evolving, existing scientific explanations include the concept of “satiation,” where repeated exposure leads to nonsensical perceptions. Related research on the verbal transformation effect and obsessive-compulsive disorder offers further insights into this phenomenon.
Receiving the Ig Nobel prize for literature is an honor, as it recognizes scientific works that provoke laughter and contemplation. We hope that our research on jamais vu will inspire further investigation and deeper insights in the future.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
