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Jamais vu might involve looking at a familiar face and discovering it suddenly unusual or unknown. Artists have it briefly– losing their method a really familiar passage of music. You may have had it going to a familiar location and ending up being disorientated or seeing it with “brand-new eyes”.
Repetition can do something even more uncommon and astonishing. The opposite of familiarity is “jamais vu”, when something you understand to be familiar feels unbelievable or novel in some method. In our current research, which has actually simply won an Ig Nobel award for literature, we examined the system behind the phenomenon.
Its an experience which is even rarer than familiarity and possibly much more uncommon and upsetting. When you ask individuals to describe it in questionnaires about experiences in day-to-day life they provide accounts like: “While writing in my tests, I compose a word correctly like appetite however I keep looking at the word over and over once again due to the fact that I have second thoughts that it may be wrong.”
Repetition has a weird relationship with the mind. Take the experience of familiarity, when we mistakenly think have actually experienced an unique circumstance in the past– leaving you with a scary sense of pastness. We have found that déjà vu is actually a window into the functions of our memory system.
In every day life, it can be provoked by repeating or gazing, but it neednt be. One of us, Akira, has actually had it driving on the freeway, necessitating that he pull over onto the hard shoulder to allow his strangeness with the pedals and the guiding wheel to “reset”. The good news is, in the wild, its rare.
When the part of the brain which discovers familiarity de-synchronises with reality, our research found that the phenomenon occurs. Remembrance is the signal which signals you to this weirdness: it is a kind of “truth checking” for the memory system.
Basic set up
We do not know much about jamais vu. We guessed it would be quite easy to induce in the lab. If you just ask someone to repeat something over and over, they frequently find it ends up being worthless and complicated.
People explained their experiences as varying from “They lose their suggesting the more you take a look at them” to “seemed to lose control of hand” and our favourite “it does not seem right, nearly looks like its not really a word but somebodys fooled me into thinking it is.”
This was the standard design of our experiments on jamais vu. In a very first experiment, 94 undergraduates spent their time consistently writing the very same word. They did it with twelve various words which varied from the commonplace, such as “door”, to less typical, such as “sward”.
It took us around 15 years to write up and release this clinical work. In 2003, we were acting on a hunch that people would feel weird while repeatedly writing a word. Among us, Chris, had seen that the lines he had been asked to consistently compose as a punishment at secondary school made him feel strange– as if it werent genuine.
Try writing the 33 times. Christopher Moulin, CC BY
We asked individuals to copy out the word as quickly as possible, but informed them they were permitted to stop, and provided a couple of reasons they may stop consisting of feeling peculiar, being bored or their hand injuring. Stopping due to the fact that things started to feel weird was the most common option picked, with about 70% stopping at least as soon as for feeling something we specified as jamais vu. This typically occured after about one minute (33 repetitions)– and typically for familiar words.
In a second experiment we used just the word “the”, figuring that it was the most common. This time, 55% of people stopped composing for factors constant with our definition of jamais vu (however after 27 repetitions).
In 1907, one of psychologys unrecognized founding figures, Margaret Floy Washburn, released an experiment with one of her trainees which showed the “loss of associative power” in words that were stared at for 3 minutes. The words ended up being odd, lost their significance and became fragmented over time.
We had actually reinvented the wheel. Such introspective techniques and examinations had simply fallen out of favour in psychology.
Much deeper insights
Take the experience of déjà vu, when we mistakenly think have experienced an unique scenario in the past– leaving you with a scary sense of pastness. The opposite of déjà vu is “jamais vu”, when something you understand to be familiar feels unique or unbelievable in some method. Jamais vu might involve looking at a familiar face and finding it unknown or suddenly unusual. Stopping due to the fact that things began to feel unusual was the most common choice chosen, with about 70% stopping at least when for feeling something we defined as jamais vu. Jamais vu is a signal to you that something has actually become too automatic, too fluent, too repetitive.
It also appears related to research study into obsessive compulsive condition (OCD), which looked at the impact of compulsively staring at things, such as lit gas rings. Like consistently composing, the results are weird and mean that reality begins to slip, however this may assist us understand and treat OCD. If consistently inspecting the door is locked makes the job meaningless, it will mean that it is difficult to know if the door is locked, and so a vicious circle starts.
We are just starting to comprehend jamais vu. The main clinical account is of “satiation”– the overloading of a representation until it becomes ridiculous. Associated concepts consist of the “verbal change impact” whereby repeating a word over and over triggers so-called neighbours so that you start off listening to the looped word “hair” over and over, but then listeners report hearing “dress,” “stress,” or “flower designer”.
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It makes good sense that this needs to happen. Our cognitive systems need to stay versatile, permitting us to direct our attention to wherever is needed rather than getting lost in repeated tasks for too long.
Eventually, we are flattered to have been granted the Ig Nobel reward for literature. The winners of these prizes contribute scientific works which “make you laugh and then make you believe”. Hopefully our work on jamais vu will motivate more research study and even higher insights in the near future.
Akira OConnor, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of St Andrews and Christopher Moulin, Professor of cognitive neuropsychology, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA).
Our special contribution is the concept that transformations and losses of meaning in repetition are accompanied by a particular sensation– jamais vu. Jamais vu is a signal to you that something has actually become too automated, too fluent, too recurring. It helps us “snap out” of our present processing, and the sensation of unreality remains in fact a truth check.
