Jamais vu

I was at my laptop writing a response to a reader the other day when I looked over at our Alexa and couldn’t recall her name I’d called more times than I can count. I racked my tiny brain until Jeanetta breezed in and reminded me (she’s always saving the day).

I tend to forget things from time to time as part of failing to grow younger, but can’t recall many episodes where I draw a complete blank involving the name of something I use every day.

A bit of research provided an answer for this experience I’d never heard of.

It appears I had stumbled into a jamais vu, which is French for “never seen.” Turns out most of us share the phenomenon during our lifetimes, according to an article in Medical News Today (MNT).

These lapses can happen any time in a number of ways, wrote Corrie Pelc. “Have you ever suddenly looked at a word that you write frequently and questioned whether you spelled it correctly, as if you we seeing it for the first time? … Or have you walked into your childhood home as an adult, and for some reason, the living room — which has not changed

— feels completely unfamiliar to you?” Those are examples of jamais vu.

MNT said it consulted with six medical experts about effects of the phenomenon.

Basically, jamais vu is the experience of suddenly feeling unfamiliar with something you know well.

“We describe jamais vu as the opposite of déjà vu — it is the feeling that something is unreal or unusual, whilst at the same time knowing it is something you are very familiar with,” Dr. Chris Moulin, a researcher in the Laboratoire de Psychologie & Neuro-Cognition at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France, and lead author of a study on jamais vu, told MNT. “You get it, for example, when a word that is [spelled] correctly looks ‘wrong.’”

Dr. Dung Trinh, founder of the Healthy-Brain-Clinic, told MNT: “Jamais vu is a psychological phenomenon that involves a temporary feeling of unfamiliarity with a familiar word, phrase, or even a familiar person or place. In the case of jamais vu, you encounter something familiar, but it suddenly seems strange or completely new to you, as if you’ve never seen or heard it before.“

I wondered about what happened to cause the lapse and any larger health implications a jamais vu episode might have. While it remains a mystery, some experts shared their hypotheses with MNT on what might happen to trigger it.

Jamais vu is a temporary disconnection between our perception and memory, said Dr. Karen D. Sullivan, a board-certified neuropsychologist and owner of I Care for your Brain. “It is likely that brain pathways that are typically in sync become temporarily disconnected. It has been theorized that we differentiate between the novel and the familiar through a series of circuits in the midbrain and that a disconnection from medial temporal memory structures gives rise to the sensation of jamais vu,” she told MNT.

Dr. David Merrill, a geriatric psychiatrist and director of the Pacific Neuroscience Institute’s Pacific Brain Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif., told MNT there might be an overlap between jamais vu and dissociative experiences generated through the use of psychedelics.

“Part of what’s so jarring about this phenomenon is it’s unexpected,” said Merrill. “To suddenly feel disoriented and not know why, or to not have anticipated that you’re going to have this almost out-of-body experience, could be very frightening because there’s no certainty it’s temporary … .

“If you take psilocybin, you can know there’s about six to eight hours of the psychedelic experience where the brain activity is changing in a way that’s been studied and reliably can help increase neuroplasticity and may help people be less depressed or less anxious [if] it’s used in a way to process thoughts and feelings and experiences.”

Moulin told MNT, “It’s a little window into how strange feelings and evaluations can occur. The feeling that a word is [spelled] wrong even [though] you know it isn’t, is not unlike delusions such as Capgras where you say someone looks like they should but they are not who they seem to be. Often the delusion involves a wellknown person having been replaced by an identical-looking imposter.

“Jamais vu illustrates a bit how higher-level feelings and processes can become disassociated from perceptual processes like word reading or face recognition. 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 on jamais vu] it happens as a result [of] having ‘over-processed’ a word until it becomes too automatic.”

OK, valued readers, I know more than I probably need to about the wily jamais vu, and I’ve taped Alexa’s name to her machine.

Now go out into the world and treat everyone you meet exactly like you want them to treat you.