Repetition has a strange connection with the mind. Take the experience of deja vu, where we mistakenly believe we experienced a new situation in the past, leaving us with a frightening sense of the past. But we discovered that déjà vu is actually a window into the workings of our memory system.

Our research found that this phenomenon occurs when the part of the brain that perceives familiarity becomes out of sync with reality. Déjà vu is a signal that alerts you to this oddity: a kind of “fact check” for the memory system.

But repetition can make something even more surprising and unusual. The opposite of déjà vu is “jamai vu,” meaning that what you know as familiar seems unreal or new in some way. We investigated the mechanism behind this phenomenon in our recent study, which won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

never seen It may involve looking at a familiar face and suddenly finding it unfamiliar or unfamiliar. Musicians feel this instantly; They get lost in a very familiar piece of music. Maybe you entered a familiar place and lost your bearings, or maybe you saw it with “new eyes.”

This is an experience that is even rarer and perhaps more unusual and disturbing than deja vu. When you ask people to describe it in surveys about everyday experiences, they explain: “When I’m writing an exam, I spell a word like ‘appetite’ correctly, but I keep looking at the word again and again because I’m having second thoughts that it might not be correct.”

It can be triggered by repetition or looking at it in daily life, but it doesn’t have to be that way. One of us, Akira, had trouble driving on the highway, so he had to pull over to “reset” his unfamiliarity with the pedals and steering wheel. Fortunately, this is rare in the wild.

Simple installation

We don’t know much about Jamai Vu. However, we assumed that it would be fairly easy to induce in the laboratory. If you ask someone to repeat something over and over again, they often find that it becomes meaningless and confusing.

This was the basic plan of our Jamais vu experiments. In the first experiment, 94 students spent time rewriting the same word. They did this using twelve different words, ranging from common words like “door” to less common ones like “sword.”

We asked participants to copy the word as quickly as possible, but told them they were allowed to stop and gave them a variety of reasons why they might stop, including feeling weird, bored, or arm pain. The most common choice was to stop because things started to feel strange; Nearly 70% stopped at least once to experience something we describe as jamais vu. This usually occurred after about one minute (33 repetitions) and generally for familiar words.

In the second experiment, we used only the word “the” because we believed it to be the most common word. This time, 55% of people stopped writing (but only after 27 iterations) for reasons that fit our definition of jamais vu.

People have described their experiences as “losing meaning as they looked at them,” “felt like they were losing control of their hands,” and our favorite: “it doesn’t feel right, like it’s not a whole word, and Someone made me think it was.”

It took us approximately 15 years to write and publish this research paper. In 2003, we acted on the hunch that people would feel awkward repeating a single word. One of us, Chris, noticed that the lines he was asked to write over and over as punishment in high school gave him a strange feeling; As if these weren’t real.

It took 15 years because we weren’t as smart as we thought we were. It wasn’t the innovation we thought it would be. In 1907, Margaret Floy Washburn, one of psychology’s unsung founders, published an experiment with one of her students that showed a “loss of associative power” in words viewed for three minutes.

Over time, words became strange, lost their meaning and fell apart. We reinvented the wheel. Such introspective methods and research have fallen out of favor in psychology.

deeper understanding

Our unique contribution is the idea that a special emotion accompanies the transformations and losses of meaning that occur through repetition. jamais vu.

never seen It’s a sign to you that something has become too automatic, too smooth, too repetitive. It helps us “escape” from our current functioning, and the feeling of unreality is actually a reality check.

It only makes sense for this to happen. Our cognitive systems must remain flexible, allowing us to direct our attention where it is needed rather than getting lost in repetitive tasks for too long. We are just beginning to understand Jamai Vyu. The basic scientific explanation is “saturation”; is to overload an idea until it becomes meaningless.

Related ideas include the “verbal transformation effect”; where repeating a word over and over activates pseudo-neighbours, so you start hearing the cyclical word “stress” over and over again, but then listeners report hearing “dress,” “stress.” or “florist”.

It also appears to be related to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) research, which examines the effect of compulsively looking at objects such as burning rings of gas. As I have written many times, the consequences of this are strange and mean that reality begins to fade away, but it can help us understand and treat OCD.

If re-checking whether the door is locked makes it pointless, this will mean that it will become difficult to understand whether the door is locked and thus a vicious circle will begin. After all, we are proud to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The winners of these awards write scientific studies that “first make people laugh and then think.” We hope that our work on Jamais vu will inspire further research and greater understanding in the near future.