Déjà vu has been studied for decades and its opposite has barely been touched. means finding something subjectively unfamiliar that you know perfectly well to be familiar. Producing it on demand would make it testable, so participants copied a single word over and over, stopping when it felt peculiar, when the task ended, or whenever else they wanted. How long does it take, and does it happen to everyone?
It takes about thirty repetitions, and it happens to most people. About two-thirds of all participants reported a strange subjective experience during the task, in roughly one-third of all trials, typically after around thirty copies or a minute of writing. Those laboratory experiences connected to real-world episodes of unfamiliarity. The correlations with age and found for déjà vu did not reappear.
Déjà vu has accumulated decades of research, and its opposite has received almost none. Jamais vu is operationalized as finding subjectively unfamiliar something we know to be familiar, and the first problem with studying it is availability: you cannot wait around for it to happen to a participant.
So the researchers induced it, through . Participants repeatedly copied words until they felt peculiar, until they had completed the task, or until they had some other reason to stop. The stopping rule is doing real work there, since it lets the experience itself set the endpoint rather than an arbitrary number of repetitions.
About two-thirds of all participants reported strange subjective experiences during the task, occurring in about one-third of all trials. The typical onset came after around thirty repetitions, or roughly one minute of copying. The authors describe these as jamais vu, and found they related to participants’ real-world experiences of unfamiliarity. The mechanism they point to is .
The comparison with déjà vu cuts both ways. Known patterns of correlation with age and dissociative experiences replicated for déjà vu itself, and the same pattern did not hold for this experimental analogue of jamais vu, which suggests real differences between the two. In daily life, though, people who reported déjà vu more often also reported jamais vu more often. The authors offer the induction method as a way of fast-tracking a neglected topic, which is a fair description of what it is and is not.
wat. Copy one word thirty times and it tends to come loose from its meaning, for about two-thirds of people who try it.
wat wat
An experience you can induce in a minute with a pen is one you can study. That is how déjà vu research advanced, and it gives the neglected half of the pair the same route.
How do we know?
Moulin and colleagues had participants repeatedly copy words until they felt peculiar, had finished, or chose to stop, and compared the reported experiences against measures used in déjà vu research.
What is still unknown
Roughly one-third of trials produced anything, and the correlation pattern diverged from déjà vu, so treating the induced experience as the same phenomenon as the spontaneous one is an assumption rather than a result.
Learn something?
Where to next
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