Here’s an experiment: jot down your name on a piece of paper. Do it again, and repeat up to thirty times as quickly as possible. As you progress, there’s a good chance you’ll notice something peculiar.
Midway through, the letters might seem strange. The name you know so well may start to appear as meaningless scribbles, losing its familiar identity. Suddenly, it might feel as if your own name isn’t yours at all.
This brief sensation of detachment has a name, and it contrasts sharply with a more widely recognized phenomenon.
Most are familiar with déjà vu, the uncanny sense that a new experience has happened before.
In contrast, jamais vu, meaning “never seen” in French, is the unsettling feeling that something familiar suddenly seems unfamiliar or unreal.
This occurrence is subtle and often overlooked. Musicians might find themselves disoriented in a well-practiced piece, and some people stare at a known face until it becomes unrecognizable.
Neuropsychologist Akira O’Connor from the University of St Andrews has experienced it unexpectedly while driving, having to pull over because the controls felt foreign.
Unlike déjà vu, which most people experience, jamais vu is less common and less discussed.
In 2023, O’Connor, along with Chris Moulin, a cognitive neuropsychologist at Université Grenoble Alpes, received an Ig Nobel Prize—a humorous award for research that “first makes people laugh, then makes them think”.
Their work demonstrated how to induce jamais vu in a lab setting using just pen and paper.
The process was surprisingly straightforward.
Ninety-four students were asked to repeatedly write a single word—ranging from common ones like “door” to rarer ones like “sward”—until it seemed incorrect. (Similar to the name task described earlier).
Approximately 70 percent experienced this sensation after about a minute or 33 repetitions, while a second trial using the word “the” resulted in 55 percent reporting the effect after 27 repetitions.
“While writing in my exams, I write a word correctly like ‘appetite’, but I keep looking at the word over and over again because I have second thoughts that it might be wrong.”
Their accounts are vividly captured in the study:
“They lose their meaning the more you look at them.”
“Seemed to lose control of hand.”
“It doesn’t seem right, almost looks like it’s not really a word, but someone’s tricked me into thinking it is.”
One participant noted a similar experience outside of the lab: “While writing in my exams, I write a word correctly like ‘appetite’, but I keep looking at the word over and over again because I have second thoughts that it might be wrong.”
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Many have encountered this odd feeling even without knowing its name.
Psychologists attribute it to “satiation,” where repeated exposure to a word, face, or object overwhelms the brain’s perception, causing it to lose coherence.
This concept had to be rediscovered over time.
O’Connor and Moulin spent about 15 years crafting what they believed was a novel experiment, only to find that Margaret Floy Washburn and her student Elizabeth Severance had conducted similar research in 1907, documenting “the loss of associative power in words after long fixation”.
Staring at a word for around three minutes, Severance and Washburn observed, can cause it to disintegrate.
Satiation was long thought to be a top-down phenomenon, a cognitive glitch affecting language and meaning processing.
A 2024 study in Communications Biology challenges this view.
Researchers developed a deep-learning model simulating the visual cortex, the part of the brain handling basic shape processing, to observe how it recognized repeated visual patterns over time.
They found that accuracy initially improved, then declined without other changes, suggesting that satiation may arise from bottom-up visual processing.
If this holds true for human brains, jamais vu might originate not from a loss of meaning but from the visual system’s failure to recognize a word’s form.
Not everyone is equally susceptible: a 2023 study found that older adults are less affected by satiation than younger individuals.
Related: Feeling a Presence, Seeing Visions, Déjà Vu? Huge Study Maps The ‘Uncanny’ Experiences We Rarely Talk About
Jamais vu has a more intense counterpart. In those with temporal lobe epilepsy, it can manifest as a seizure aura, creating an unfamiliar feeling over a known environment, often accompanied by fear.
Conversely, satiation may influence OCD.
Repeated checking behaviors, like ensuring a door is locked, can trigger satiation, causing doubt about the lock’s status and perpetuating the cycle of checking.
Research into these phenomena is still in its early stages.
The relationships between satiation, verbal transformation, and jamais vu, as well as the implications of recent visual cortex findings, remain open questions for scientists.
So, the next time your own name appears unfamiliar, you’re not imagining it. You are witnessing a complex brain function that scientists are still striving to fully understand.
This article was fact-checked by Rebecca Dyer and edited by Rebecca Dyer. While we pride ourselves on our process, we are only human. If you spot a mistake, please let us know.
