Jamais Vu: Why a Word You Have Always Known Suddenly Looks Strange

You write a simple word, “door”, say, and somewhere around the twentieth time something goes wrong. The letters are all in place and you know it is spelled correctly, yet it suddenly looks invented, a string of strokes nobody ever introduced you to.

That strangeness with the most familiar things has a name: jamais vu, French for “never seen.”

It is the exact mirror image of déjà vu, and until a few years ago almost nobody had measured it in a lab.

What is jamais vu?

Psychologist Chris Moulin and his team define it as finding something subjectively strange that we know to be familiar. Nothing is forgotten: what disappears is the feeling of knowing it.

The most common everyday example, they say, is spelling. But they also describe more unsettling ones:

• Faces of people close to you that, for an instant, seem to belong to someone else.
• Familiar places that look like a stage set.
• Automatic actions, like driving or playing an instrument, that abruptly lose all their fluency.

The common thread is a split between two things we usually take for granted as a package: knowing what something is and feeling that you know it.

The experiment that won an Ig Nobel

Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin and Akira O’Connor published a study in the journal Memory (online in 2020, in the 2021 print issue) with a deliberately playful title: “The the the the induction of jamais vu in the laboratory”.

The procedure looked like a plain handwriting exercise:

1. 93 students at the University of Leeds received a booklet with room to copy a word up to 120 times.
2. The official instruction was to see how many times they could write it legibly in two minutes.
3. They were warned they might start to feel odd, and that if so they could stop and explain why.

Nobody said the words “jamais vu” in front of them, so as not to plant the answer.

The results were striking: 71% of participants stopped at least once because of that feeling of strangeness. On average they did so at around 68 seconds, after about 33 repetitions.

Their descriptions read almost like literature:

“They lose their meaning the more you look at them. They just seem like a string of letters instead of a whole word.”

In 2023 the work received the Ig Nobel Prize for Literature, the award for research that first makes people laugh and then makes them think. The citation sums it up with a wink: for studying what it feels like to repeat a word many, many, many, many times.

The most familiar words are the first to break

One of the study’s most curious findings runs against intuition.

Moulin used words at three levels of familiarity, from rare terms (“sward”, “usury”) to everyday words (“door”, “money”, “room”).

Rare words produced less jamais vu than common ones. Strangeness seems to need some prior familiarity to break: you cannot stop knowing what you never fully knew.

In a second experiment, with 120 people who were not psychology students, the team used a single word: “the”, the most frequent word in English. 55% felt jamais vu, on average after about 28 repetitions.

A phenomenon described since 1907

Word satiation is not a recent discovery.

In 1907, Elizabeth Severance and Margaret Floy Washburn asked six trained observers to stare at a word for three minutes. With “blood”, one of them noted at 24 seconds that the b and the d looked like the same letter reversed, and at 179 seconds saw nothing more than a collection of letters.

Shortly afterward, Edward Titchener offered his readers a home experiment: repeat any word aloud until its sound goes “blank”, something he described as puzzling and a little frightening.

The technical name arrived in the 1960s, courtesy of Leon Jakobovits and Wallace Lambert at McGill University: semantic satiation.

Moulin proposes dividing the terms precisely:

• Jamais vu is the subjective experience, what it feels like.
• Semantic satiation is the cognitive process that produces it.
• Word alienation is the experimental procedure used to trigger it.

Why does it happen? The “reset” hypothesis

Studies over recent decades suggest that repetition weakens the link between a word’s form and its meaning. We still see the letters perfectly well, but the bridge connecting them to what they mean grows tired.

Moulin’s team goes a step further and proposes, as a hypothesis still to be tested, that the strangeness serves a purpose.

On this view, when a process becomes too automatic and repetitive, the brain sends out an alert: something is off here, time to break the loop. In a 2023 popular-science article, O’Connor and Moulin captured it in an elegant paradox: the feeling of unreality would, in fact, be a reality check.

The idea fits with other findings. Research on compulsive checking, such as looking again and again to see whether the gas is off, found that repeated checking lowers confidence in one’s own memory, even when accuracy stays the same. The logic is identical: excessive repetition does not reinforce certainty, it erodes it.

This connects with something the psychology of habits knows well. Automating frees up attention, but it also leaves us running on autopilot, and jamais vu could be one of the ways the mind hands the controls back.

Jamais vu and déjà vu: two sides of the same system

In 2003, in Psychological Bulletin, psychologist Alan S. Brown gathered a proposal that arranges both phenomena with near-perfect symmetry:

• Familiarity without recollection: something new feels known. That is déjà vu.
• Recollection without familiarity: something known feels new. That is jamais vu.

The connection is not only theoretical. In Moulin’s first experiment, those who reported more déjà vu in daily life also reported more jamais vu.

But they are not identical twins. In the second study, lab-induced jamais vu was not related to age or to a tendency toward dissociative experiences, whereas déjà vu did show those links. The authors read this as a sign that the two phenomena, though related, do not work the same way.

With pareidolia something similar happens in the opposite direction: the brain does not lose the meaning of what it sees, it adds meaning to what has none, like a face in a power outlet.

When jamais vu shows up outside the lab

In everyday life it is much less common than déjà vu, according to Brown. Moulin’s own participants estimated they had felt it about three times in the previous six months, although memory-based estimates like these are always approximate.

Outside the lab it has also been described in clinical settings. Back in 1955, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield wrote of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy who felt the opposite of familiarity, an illusion of strangeness. Today, the international epilepsy classification lists jamais vu among the examples of focal cognitive seizures.

That does not turn the everyday experience into a symptom: in the lab, most healthy people had it within about a minute.

What jamais vu suggests about how we know things

Perhaps the most interesting thing about jamais vu is what it reveals by contrast: that “knowing” something is really two separate operations, identifying it and feeling it as familiar, which almost always travel together and so seem like one.

A repeated word, a face stared at for too long or a route taken a thousand times is enough to pull them apart for a moment.

Whether that strangeness is a glitch or a useful alarm is still an open question. What does seem clear is that familiarity is not a property of things but something the mind lends them, and that sometimes, without warning, it stops lending it.

Sources

• Brown, A. S. (2003). A review of the déjà vu experience. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 394-413.
• Moulin, C. J. A., Bell, N., Turunen, M., Baharin, A. and O’Connor, A. R. (2021). The the the the induction of jamais vu in the laboratory: Word alienation and semantic satiation. Memory, 29(7), 933-942.
• O’Connor, A. R. and Moulin, C. J. A. (2023). Jamais vu: the science behind eerie opposite of déjà vu. The Conversation. Link
• Severance, E. and Washburn, M. F. (1907). The loss of associative power in words after long fixation. The American Journal of Psychology, 18(2), 182-186.
• van den Hout, M. and Kindt, M. (2003). Repeated checking causes memory distrust. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 41(3), 301-316.