There's an opposite of 'déjà vu' and it's even more unsettling
Pretty much all of us will have had déjà vu at some point in our lives, it's that feeling that we've already experienced what we're living through right now.
The term comes from the French language and means 'already seen', and is an apt name for the idea of seeing something and thinking we've looked upon it before.
According to research from Professor Christopher Moulin and Dr Akira O'Connor, déjà vu is 'a window into the workings of our memory system'.
Writing in The Conversation, they explain that we get it when the part of our brain which recognises familiarity gets disconnected from reality.
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Even if you haven't actually done something before, your brain will recognise it as familiar, so it's a feeling of familiarity instead of false memories.
However, there's an opposite to déjà vu and the name for it also comes from the French language.
Just as déjà vu means 'already seen', the term 'jamais vu' means 'never seen' and it's the feeling you get when something you are certain is familiar feels new to you.
O'Connor and Moulin described certain examples of jamais vu including looking at the face of someone familiar and suddenly not knowing them, or a musician unexpectedly losing their way in a piece of familiar music.
In many cases lots of people would love to look upon the familiar with fresh eyes and experience it for the first time once more, but jamais vu comes coupled with the disorientation that your mind knows you know this even if you're struck by a sense of the unfamiliar.
Dr O'Connor described getting jamais vu while driving on the motorway when he suddenly felt like he was unfamiliar with the pedals and steering wheel of his car, resulting in him pulling over to reacquaint himself with a thing he knew very well how to do.
In an experiment, O'Connor and Moulin got 94 students to repeatedly write the same word, telling them they could stop if their hand was hurting, they were bored or they were starting to feel strange.
They found that around 70 percent of people stopped writing because of a feeling close to jamais vu, with the feeling kicking in after they'd been writing the same word over and over for a full minute.
Among the responses for why they stopped people said the words would 'lose their meaning the more you look at them', and they 'seemed to lose control of hand'.
However, the experts said their favourite response was: "It doesn’t seem right, almost looks like it’s not really a word but someone’s tricked me into thinking it is."
They think jamais vu might be your brain's way of snapping you out of becoming too automatic, and the unsettling feeling of unfamiliarity you get is a dose of reality.
It's something to think about.
Topics: Science, Weird, Mental Health
Joe Harker