Most people have felt déjà vu at least once. You walk into a room or hear a phrase and feel like you’ve been there before, even when you haven’t. It’s strange, but familiar in its own way. Jamais vu is the flip side. It’s rarer, harder to describe, and somehow more off-putting.
Jamais vu shows up when something you know suddenly feels unfamiliar. It’s when you stare at a word and it stops looking like a real word. When you write “door” or “the” and start doubting that either one has ever made sense. Sometimes it happens with faces or places. You recognize them but feel disconnected, like something essential has gone missing.
Researchers Chris Moulin and Akira O’Connor spent over a decade trying to capture the feeling. In a series of experiments, they asked participants to write the same word repeatedly. Most people stopped after about 30 rounds. They weren’t bored. They were unsettled. Words began to look fake. One person described the experience as feeling tricked, like the word had been planted as a kind of trap.
Turns Out There’s an Opposite to Déjà VU—and It’s Freakier Than the Original
Even the most basic word in the English language produced the effect. In a second experiment, people copied “the” until it stopped registering as something real. More than half said the repetition triggered a sense of unreality. Their hands kept moving, but their brains stopped attaching meaning to what they were seeing.
This isn’t a novel discovery. In 1907, psychologist Margaret Floy Washburn ran similar tests and noticed how repeated words started to break apart in people’s minds. That work was mostly forgotten until Moulin and O’Connor brought it back with updated tools and language.
Jamais vu seems to happen when the brain becomes too efficient. When something gets processed too quickly or too often, it slips out of focus. The system that helps you function on autopilot begins to short-circuit. That moment of confusion, as strange as it feels, may actually be a reset. A way for your brain to re-engage with something it had stopped noticing.
It’s not dangerous. But it does pull back the curtain on how fragile normal can be. You can write a word you’ve known forever, write it again, and feel like you’ve never seen it before. It’s just another unnerving experience in our already strange perception of reality.
The post This Mind-Bending Phenomenon Is Basically Déjà Vu in Reverse appeared first on VICE.