Discover the phenomenon of “jamais vu”, the opposite of déjà vu.

You have a Deja vu – This feeling that you have already seen or experienced a situation that is happening in the present moment – ​​is really strange. When this happens to us, it is common for us to feel confused and lost.

However, Deja vu It opens doors to understanding more about the mysteries of the mind. According to science, it helps us better understand how our memory system works. To delve deeper into this, it is also necessary to look at the opposite phenomenon: I never see you (Which is pronounced more or less like “jamé vi” and this “vi” is actually a “vu” made from frowning, classic French.)

what Deja vu Reveals the mind?

This is the conclusion of research conducted by Professor of Psychology Akira O’Connor, from the University of St Andrews, and Professor Christopher Moulin, from the field of cognitive neuropsychology, from the University of Grenoble Alpes.

They noted that the phenomenon Deja vu It occurs when the part of the brain that detects the feeling of familiarity becomes out of sync with reality. According to researchers, Deja vu It brings a warning sign about this strangeness, as if it were making Fact Checking From memory.

But the scientists also wanted to understand the opposite phenomenon, called I never see you, Which occurs when something that is known to be familiar seems unreal or new in some way. An example of this is when we see a familiar face, but for some reason it seems unfamiliar to us.

the I never see you Rare than Deja vuAnd even weird. When asked to describe it, people report things like this: “While taking the test, I write a word correctly like ‘appetite,’ but I keep looking at the word over and over again because I have doubts that it might be wrong.”

What is known about I never see you?

Still not much is known about I never see you. But, according to O’Connor and Mullen, this is an experiment that can be artificially reproduced. They did so with an instrument conducted with 94 college students who spent time writing the same words repeatedly.

They then asked participants to start writing the words as quickly as possible. They could only stop if they felt strange, bored, or if their hands started to hurt. The most common way to stop writing was feeling strange (70% reported this). This happened after about a minute, with 33 repetitions of the same word, which started to feel strange.

When asked about their feelings, participants said things like “The words lose their meaning the more I look at them” and “It’s not okay, it’s like it’s not really a word, but someone tricked me into thinking it was.”

O’Connor and Mullen published their results, concluding that students experienced a temporary “loss of associative strength” with words when they began to sound strange.I never see you It’s a sign that something has become too automatic, too fluent, too repetitive. It helps us “snap out” of our current processing, the researchers noted, and the feeling of unreality is actually a reality check.

According to them, this is natural for this to happen. They concluded that “our cognitive systems must remain flexible, allowing us to direct our attention where it is needed, rather than getting lost in repetitive tasks for too long.”