Jamais vu

How it works

Jamais vu, French for “never seen”, is the brief feeling that something you know well is strange or new¹. A well-known face can look unknown, or a musician can lose the way in a familiar piece¹². The most common example may be a correctly spelled word that looks wrong¹.

In a 2021 paper, 93 students copied 12 words over and over. They could stop if a word felt peculiar¹. Of these, 66 did so at least once, usually after about 30 copies, or one minute¹. Common words set it off more often than rare ones¹. In a second experiment, 66 of 120 adults, or 55%, stopped copying the word “the” because it felt peculiar¹.

The main explanation, satiation, is that repetition overloads a word until it stops making sense for a while²³. The researchers suggest it signals that a task has become too automatic. This idea still needs testing¹². In daily life it can come without repetition¹. They also link it to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), where checking a lock again and again may make the check feel meaningless².

How common it is

Nobody knows how often it happens in daily life. There are very few studies and no agreed definition¹. The researchers describe it as rarer than déjà vu². In the 2021 paper, students who had felt it put it at about 3 times in six months, like déjà vu¹. People who have déjà vu more often also report jamais vu more often¹. A short conference abstract reports 3% to 5% in Moscow medical students, but does not say how it asked⁶.

Try it

1. Pick a common word, such as “door” or “the”.
2. Write it by hand, fast, over and over.
3. Stop when the word starts to look wrong. In the lab this took about 30 copies¹.

The effect is temporary³.

Is it a problem?

Usually not. Brief jamais vu seems ordinary. In the 2021 paper, 3 in 4 students who felt it in the lab said they knew the feeling from before¹.

It can also be an aura, an unusual feeling just before a temporal lobe seizure⁴. It has been described in migraine too¹. Mention it to a doctor if it comes with sudden fear or a rising feeling in the stomach, or if confusion or a blank stare follows⁴.

History and culture

In 1907, Margaret Floy Washburn and her student Elizabeth Severance had six trained observers stare at printed words for three minutes. The words looked strange and lost their meaning¹². The 2021 study took its authors about 15 years to publish². It won the 2023 Ig Nobel Prize for Literature⁵.