Fascinating thing called jamais vu
I am sure most of you know about Déjà vu (already seen), the feeling that you have experienced a particular situation before. As it turns out, there are other phenomena that are grouped with this situation in psychology, namely jamais vu (never seen) and presque vu (almost seen or tip-of-the-tongue moments). Jamais vu caught my attention recently because it has been a subject for one of the 2023 Ig Nobel Prizes. For those of you who haven’t heard about Ig Nobel Prize, it is given to scientific studies that “make you laugh first, and then think”.
Jamais vu is the feeling when you momentarily lose familiarity with something you experienced before such as a word, a place, somebody. Of course this can be associated with diseases like epilepsy and schizophrenia, but it may just happen due to brain fatigue.
On this very subject, Chris Moulin, a neuropsychologist who was known for his work in deja vu, and his group published an article a few years ago in the journal Memory that was selected for the 33rd Ig Nobel Prize in Literature. Their study creatively titled as “The the the the induction of jamais vu in the laboratory: word alienation and semantic satiation” (no typos there) described how to induce jamais vu in the lab setting. The participant to the experiment were asked to copy the same word over and over again. About 2/3 of the participant reported “peculiar” feelings about the word that they were copying. Interestingly the researchers clocked this whole thing and figured out it took about a minute (or thirty repetitions) to develop these weird feelings. This study also pointed out some differences between deja vu and jamais vu.
I think these findings reveal something very cool about how brain works! Repeating the same word over and over again probably results in the repetitive activation of the same neural circuits which leads to “brain fatigue”. It may be similar to looking at a bright light source for sometime and having temporary vision problems.
Well, since I’m a curious scientist, I will conduct an experiment on my own: I will keep writing the same word over and over again (no cheating by copy-paste, I promise) and see when my brain checks out. Let’s see when yours will check out too! The word I choose is “apple”…
apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple apple
My results: At the first bolded “apple” (28th repetition) I thought, “well this is weird”. The second bolded “apple” (45) I started losing belief that “apple” is a real word 😃 I think I am quite average when it comes to the Jamais vu league according to science 😂
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