Health & Medical News - Is it really you or jamais vu?

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Is it really you or jamais vu?

Judy Skatssoon

ABC Science Online

Wednesday, 19 July 2006

If you're confronted with a familiar situation that seems oddly unrecognisable, you could be suffering from jamais vu (Image: iStockphoto)

The first scientific study of jamais vu, the reverse of déjà vu, has shown that the experience exists and can be induced, an international memory conference has heard.

Jamais vu literally means "never seen" and describes the sense of unfamiliarity in the face of very familiar things or situations, says UK researcher Dr Chris Moulin of the University of Leeds.

"If you stare at a word, for instance, it loses its meaning," says Moulin, who adds that an estimated 60% of people have experienced jamais vu.

He presented his research for the first time at the 4th International Conference on Memory in Sydney this week.

Jamais vu is the opposite of déjà vu, or "already seen", which is a sense of familiarity about an unfamiliar object, or the feeling that "I've been here before".

"Musicians can get [jamais vu] in the middle of playing a familiar passage. It's the sensation where you wake up in the morning and turn to the person next to you and feel that they're a stranger," says Moulin.

"[It can also occur] when you look at a face for too long and it begins to look strange, or when you're in a familiar place but think 'I don't know where I am', for a brief, fleeting moment."

Jamais vu was first recognised about 100 years ago when it was regarded as something of a "gentleman's intrigue", Moulin says.

But it has never been systematically studied in a laboratory until now.

Brain fatigue
Moulin says his study shows it's possible to induce jamais vu by what's known as semantic satiation, which occurs when the brain becomes fatigued in a specific way.

He asked 92 subjects to write common words such as "door" 30 times in 60 seconds.

When they were later asked to describe their experiences, 68% showed signs of jamais vu.

For example, after writing "door" over and over again some participants reported that "it looked like I was spelling something else", it "sounded like a made-up word" and "I began to doubt that I was writing the correct word for the meaning".

Some thought they had been tricked into thinking it was the right word for a door.

"If you look at something for long enough the mind gets tired and it loses it's meaning," Moulin says.

Moulin says studying jamais vu will help researchers better understand psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia or Capgras delusion, where people believe someone they know very well has been replaced by an impostor.

"It suggests that this is the normal process that might go wrong in these people, they might just have chronic jamais vu," Moulin says.

His latest research aims to induce jamais vu and monitor what actually goes on in the brain using neural imaging.