Déjà Vu Has a Stranger, Lesser-Known Opposite – And Scientists May Have Just Found Where It Starts
It's uncanny. 
Déjà vu, the strange sensation of experiencing something familiar as if for the first time, has long captivated researchers and the general public alike. However, scientists have recently focused attention on its lesser-known counterpart: jamais vu, a phenomenon where something familiar suddenly feels completely foreign and unreal. This opposite effect can strike without warning—a musician losing their place in a well-practiced song, or a person suddenly finding their own name appearing meaningless after writing it repeatedly.
Researchers at the University of St Andrews and Université Grenoble Alpes discovered they could reliably trigger jamais vu in laboratory settings using a remarkably simple method: asking participants to repeatedly copy the same word until it began to feel wrong. In their experiments, approximately 70 percent of undergraduates experienced the effect, typically after around 33 repetitions. Participants described the sensation as words appearing to lose their meaning, as though they had been tricked into thinking something was a word when it clearly was not.
The leading explanation for jamais vu involves a concept called satiation—the idea that intense repetition temporarily overloads the brain’s mental representation of a word or object. Interestingly, this theory traces back over a century to early psychology research. Recent advances in neuroscience suggest satiation may originate in the visual cortex rather than higher language centers of the brain, meaning the breakdown might begin with basic visual processing rather than meaning comprehension.
Originally reported by Sciencealert →
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