Jamais vu: When a Familiar Experience Feels New

We’ve all heard of or experienced déjà vu ─ the feeling that you’ve already seen or experienced something before. But scientists now recognize the opposite condition, called jamais vu ─ when a familiar experience feels entirely new.

According to Medical News Today, jamais vu means “never seen” in French. You may encounter this strange condition if you try to spell a word you’ve written frequently, and it looks unfamiliar. Or your living room looks different, although nothing has been moved or changed.

Some experts theorize that jamais vu can be compared to dissociation or delusion and may be caused by brain pathways that are temporarily out of sync. Others believe that the condition may be the result of temporal lobe dysfunction due to stress, fatigue, or neurological conditions.

“Jamias vu illustrates a bit how higher-level feelings and processes can become dissociated from perceptual processes like word reading or face recognition,” said Chris Moulin, a memory researcher from France, and the lead author of a study on jamais vu. “In healthy populations it’s just for a fleeting moment. In delusions, it happens in a distressing and convincing manner.  And in our experiment (for the study) it also happens as a result of having ‘over-processed’ a word until it becomes too automatic.”

Experiencing occasional jamais vu can be easily regulated by pausing, taking a break, and returning to the material. However, when a person cannot override these experiences or they happen frequently, a consultation with a neuropsychologist may be in order to determine whether an underlying issue, such as epilepsy or migraines, are causing the issue.

“It shouldn’t be something that we’re experiencing often day to day,” said Dr. David Merrill, a geriatric psychiatrist and director of the Pacific Neuroscience Institute’s Pacific Brain Health Center in Santa Monica, California.  “If it does come up repeatedly, it might signal that there’s something changing in the brain. There are really good treatments for seizure disorders and epilepsy, so if you’re worried about it, you should get checked out.”