Repetition can create a fascinating effect on our minds. Think about déjà vu, that eerie feeling when you’re certain you’ve faced a situation before, even though it’s brand new. It really leaves you feeling a bit unsettled, doesn’t it?
Interestingly, researchers have found that déjà vu provides insight into how our memory works.
It turns out that déjà vu occurs when the part of the brain responsible for recognizing familiarity becomes out of sync with what’s actually happening. In a way, it serves as a kind of “fact-checking” prompt for our memory system.
But repetition can cause something even weirder.
The flip side of déjà vu is known as “jamais vu,” in which something you usually recognize comes off as strange or unfamiliar. In our recent research—by the way, it even won an Ig Nobel award for literature—we delved into how this phenomenon works.
Jamais vu can happen when you see a familiar face and suddenly it becomes strange, or if a musician finds themselves lost in a part of a song they know well. You might have felt it in a familiar place, suddenly seeing it in a completely different light.
This experience is even less common than déjà vu and can be pretty unsettling. When asked about it, people reflected experiences such as, “While taking an exam, I wrote ‘appetite’ correctly but kept questioning if it looked right.”
In everyday settings, it might be prompted by staring or repetition, though that’s not always necessary. One of our team members, Akira, experienced it while driving on the motorway, feeling so disoriented that he had to pull over just to “reset” his familiarity with the controls. Fortunately, it’s not something that happens often in real life.
Simple setup
We really don’t know a lot about jamais vu. However, we suspected it could be triggered easily in a lab environment. For instance, if someone writes a word repeatedly, it often starts to feel confusing and meaningless.
This idea guided our experiments on jamais vu. In the first experiment, 94 undergraduates were asked to repeatedly write different words, from common ones like “door” to rarer ones like “sward.”
Participants were encouraged to write as quickly as possible, but we let them know they could stop if they started feeling odd or bored, or if their hands hurt.
The most common reason for stopping turned out to be the odd feelings associated with jamais vu, with about 70% of participants pausing at least once after roughly one minute (33 repetitions)—most often with familiar words.
In a second experiment, we focused solely on the word “the,” being the most frequently used. Here, 55% of participants stopped writing for reasons matching our definition of jamais vu, but this occurred after 27 repetitions.
Participants described the odd feelings as ranging from “They lose meaning the more you look at them” to “I felt I was losing control of my hand,” with one amusing remark being, “It doesn’t seem real, almost like I’ve been tricked into thinking it is a word.”
It took us around 15 years to research and publish our findings. Back in 2003, we had a gut feeling that people would find it strange to write words over and over. One of us, Chris, recalled that the repetitive lines he had to write as punishment in school made him feel oddly disconnected from them.
It took so long partly because we weren’t as clever as we thought; the idea wasn’t entirely new. Back in 1907, a psychologist named Margaret Floy Washburn demonstrated that words lose their associative power if stared at for an extended period.
She found that words could become strange and fragmented over time.
Essentially, we had reinvented the wheel, as those kinds of introspective studies had fallen out of favor in psychology.
Deeper insights
Our unique contribution relates to how transformations and loss of meaning in repetition are tied to a specific sensation: jamais vu.
This sensation acts as a warning that something has become too repetitive or automatic, prompting us to refocus our attention rather than getting lost in tasks that start to feel mundane.
This makes logical sense; our cognitive system needs to remain adaptable, allowing us to shift focus as necessary.
We’re just scratching the surface of understanding jamais vu. The primary scientific explanation points to “satiation,” where overwhelming a representation renders it nonsensical.
There’s also the “verbal transformation effect,” where repeated words activate similar-sounding words, leading listeners to hear “dress,” “stress,” or “florist” when they initially intended to listen to “tress.”
Additionally, it’s linked to research on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which explored how compulsive behaviors, like staring at fixtures, can similarly cause reality to feel distorted.
If checking the same door repeatedly renders the task meaningless, it complicates knowing whether that door is locked, pulling one into a downward spiral.
In the end, receiving the Ig Nobel prize for literature makes us feel quite honored. These awards recognize contributions that “make you laugh and then make you think.”
We hope that our research into jamais vu paves the way for more studies and deeper insights ahead.
