Summary: Repetition in the brain leads to two strange phenomena: déjà vu and its lesser known counterpart, jamais vu. The latter makes familiar experiences seem new and frighteningly unsettling.
Recent research, which won an Ig Nobel Prize, tested this by having participants write words over and over again, with many of them feeling choked after just 33 repetitions. This research provides insight into possible links between cognitive flexibility and disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Important events:
- Jamais vu is the feeling that familiar situations suddenly feel new or surreal.
- In the experiment, 70% of the participants got confused after typing a word repeatedly about 33 times.
- Research prior to 1907 also highlighted this phenomenon, showing a “loss of associative force” when words were presented repeatedly.
They are: the conversation
The mind has a strange relationship with repetition. For example, experience déjà vu, when we mistakenly believe we’ve encountered a new situation in the past, leaving you with a frightening sense of the past. But we found that déjà vu is actually a window into how our memory system works.
Our research shows that this phenomenon occurs when the part of the brain that detects familiarity does not match reality. Déjà vu is the signal that alerts you to this strangeness: it’s somehow… Storage System “Fact Check”.
But repetition can create something even stranger and more unusual. The opposite of déjà vu is jamais vu, when you know something that seems unreal or somehow new. between us Current researchwhat is it He just won the Ig Nobel Prize for LiteratureWe investigate the mechanism behind this phenomenon.
You may see a familiar face in Jamais Bhu and Suddenly find it unusual or unknown. Musicians have this problem temporarily because they get lost in very familiar music. You may be disorientated by visiting a familiar place or seeing it with “fresh eyes.”
It’s an experience It’s rarer than déjà vu Maybe even stranger and more annoying. When people are asked to describe their daily experiences on questionnaires, they report: “When I’m writing my test, I spell a word like ‘hunger’ correctly, but I keep looking up the word because I have a second.” Perception is wrong. may be
In everyday life it can be induced by repetition or looking, but it does not have to be. One of us, Akira, had highway driving experience that required him to stop on the shoulder so he could familiarize himself with the pedals and steering wheel and “reset”. Fortunately, it is rare in the wild.
Easy setup
We don’t know much about Jamais Fu. But we assumed that it would be very easy to make in the laboratory. If you ask someone to repeat something over and over again, they will often find that it becomes meaningless and confusing.
This was the initial setup for our experiments with Jamais Fu. In the first experiment, 94 college students spent their time writing the same word over and over again. To do this, they used twelve different words, ranging from common words like “door” to less common words like “wing.”
We asked participants to copy the word as quickly as possible, but told them they could stop and gave them some reasons why they might stop, including feeling weird, bored, or hurting their hand. The most common decision was to quit because things seemed strange, with nearly 70% quitting at least once because they felt something we defined as “jamais vu.” This usually happens after about 1 minute (33 repetitions) – usually with well-known words.
In a second experiment, we used only the word “the”, believing it to be the most common. This time, 55% stopped writing for reasons consistent with our definition of jamais vu (albeit after 27 iterations).
People have described their experiences as “the more you look at them, the more they lose money” to “you feel like you’re losing control of the hand” and our favorite: “It doesn’t feel right, it almost feels like it’s not real. Words are but fooling someone.” I think about it.
It took us about 15 years to write and publish this scientific work. In 2003, we hypothesized that people would feel weird if they typed a word over and over again. One of us, Chris, noticed that the lines he was repeatedly asked to write as punishment in high school made him feel weird—like they weren’t real.
It took 15 years because we weren’t as smart as we thought we were. It was not as modern as we imagined. In 1907, one of the anonymous founders of psychology, Margaret Floy Washburnpublished an experience One of his students was showing “loss of associative energy” when looking at words for three minutes. Words have become strange, lost their meaning and fragmented over time.
We reinvented the wheel. These methods and introspective investigations have fallen out of favor with psychology.
Deep insight
Our unique contribution is the idea that the loss of meaning of transformation and repetition comes with a specific feeling – Jamais Fau. For you, jamais vu is a signal that something has become too spontaneous, too fluid, too repetitive. It helps us get out of our current processing and the feeling of unreality is actually a reality check.
It is understandable that this would happen. Our cognitive systems need to remain flexible so that we can direct our attention to where we need it rather than getting lost in repetitive tasks for too long.
We are just beginning to understand Jamais Vu. The main scientific explanation is “saturation” – overloading a representation until it becomes meaningless. Includes related concepts “Effects of Verbal Change” Repeating a word over and over activates so-called neighbors, so you hear the word “trace” over and over, but then listeners report hearing the word “dress”, “stress” or “floral”.
This appears to be related to research on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). I look at the effect Compulsively looking at objects, such as burning gas rings. As written over and over again, the effects are strange and reality begins to slip away, but it can help us understand and treat OCD. Repeated checks to see if the door is closed make the task pointless, meaning it’s hard to know if the door is closed, and so the vicious cycle begins.
Finally, we are happy to win the IG Nobel Prize for Literature. Winners of this award contribute scholarly work that “makes you laugh and then makes you think.” We hope our work on Jamais Vu will inspire further research and greater insights in the near future.
About Jamais Vu news and neuroscience research
Author: Christopher Mullen And Akira O’Connor
They are: the conversation
Contact: Christopher Mullan and Akira O’Connor – The Conversation
Build: Image source: Neuroscience News
