2023-10-01 04:00:02
Our mind has a special relationship with repetition. Consider the experience of déjà vu, when we wrongly believe we experienced a situation in the past, which leaves us with an unsettling sensation of flashback. We discovered that déjà vu actually offers a view of how our memory works (Generally speaking, memory is the storage of information. It is also recollection…).
Jamais-vu occurs when something we know is familiar suddenly seems unreal or new. The main scientific explanation for the phenomenon is “satiation”, which consists of overloading a representation until it loses all meaning.
Image d’illustration Pixabay
Our research has shown that the phenomenon occurs when the part of the brain that detects familiarity becomes out of sync with reality. Déjà vu constitutes a signal (General terms A signal is a simplified and generally coded message. It exists…) which warns us of an oddity: it is a kind of “reality check” carried out by the memory system.
Repetition, however, can have even more disturbing and unusual effects. The opposite of déjà vu is “jamais-vu,” when something you know is familiar suddenly seems unreal or new. As part of our recent researchfor which we have just won the Ig Nobel Prize for Literature, we studied the mechanism at the origin of this phenomenon.
An unusual and disturbing experience
The never-before-seen consists, for example, of seeing a familiar face and suddenly find strange or foreign. Musicians can have this feeling when they get lost in a passage of music they know very well. We also feel this effect when we arrive in a familiar place and feel disoriented or take a new look at it.
This is still an experience rarer than déjà vu and perhaps even more unusual and disturbing. When people are asked to describe it in questionnaires regarding daily life experiences, we get responses such as “During an exam, I write a word like “appetite” correctly, but I read and reread the word because I can’t be sure it’s well written.”
In everyday life, this can be caused by repetition or staring at something, but this is not always the case. Akira, a member of our team, once had this feeling while driving on the highway, which required him to stop on the shoulder to relieve his feeling of not knowing what to do with the pedals and steering wheel. can “reset”. Luckily, this doesn’t happen often.
A simple experience
We don’t know much regarding the unheard of. But we assumed that it would be quite easy to induce it in the laboratory. When you ask someone to repeat something many times, it often loses meaning and becomes confusing.
It is on this basis that we carried out our research on the never-seen-before. In a first experiment, 94 undergraduate students were given the task of writing the same word several times. They did this with twelve different words that ranged from the most mundane, like “door”, to less common ones, like “sword” (an unusual term for lawn).
We told participants that they had to copy the word as quickly as possible and that they were allowed to stop. We gave them some reasons why they might take a break, such as feeling weird, bored, or having a sore hand. The most common reason given was feeling like things were getting strange, and regarding 70% of participants stopped at least once because they felt something akin to “never before.” This usually happened following a minute (33 repetitions) – and especially for familiar words.
In a second experiment, we only used the word “the”, believing that it was the most common word in the English language. This time, 55% of people stopped writing for reasons that met our definition of never-before-seen (following 27 repetitions on average).
Here’s how participants described their experience: “They lose their senses the more you look at them,” “I feel like I’m losing control of my hand,” and, our favorite, “It doesn’t feel right, It’s almost as if it wasn’t a word but someone had tricked me into thinking it was.”
Try writing the word “the” 33 times.
Christopher Moulin, CC BY
A “loss of associative power”
It took us regarding 15 years to write up and publish our results. In 2003, we worked from the assumption that people felt weird writing a word many times in a row. Chris, a member of our team, had noticed that the sentences he was repeatedly asked to write as punishment in high school felt strange, like they weren’t real.
It took 15 years because we weren’t that smart and our idea wasn’t as innovative as we thought it was. In 1907, Margaret Floy Washburna pioneer of psychology who remained in the shadows, published a experience conducted with one of his students who showed the “loss of associative power” of words that we stared at for three minutes. Words became strange, lost their meaning and fragmented over time.
We had reinvented the wheel. These introspective methods and investigations were simply no longer popular in psychology.
And if we delve a little deeper
Our only contribution is to argue that the transformations and losses of meaning linked to repetition are accompanied by a particular feeling: the never-seen. It tells us that something has become too automatic, too easy, too repetitive. It allows us to emerge from our current functioning, and the feeling of strangeness constitutes a confrontation with reality.
It makes sense that this would happen. 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.
We are only at the beginning of our understanding of the never-seen-before. The main scientific explanation is “satiation”, which consists of overloading a representation until it loses all meaning. Similar ideas include: “the verbal transformation effect”where the repetition of a word activates “neighboring” words, so that if people start by listening to the word “tress” over and over, they end up hearing “dress”, “stress”. English), or general syndrome…)” or “florist”.
This phenomenon seems linked to research on obsessive compulsive disorders (OCD), where we have been interested in what is happening when someone compulsively stares at objects, such as lit stove burners. As with repetitive writing, this creates a transformation of reality, which can help us understand and treat OCD. If repeatedly checking to see if the door is locked eventually makes the task meaningless, it makes it difficult to know whether the door is locked or not, and a circle (A circle is a closed plane curve made up of points located equally…) vicious is triggered.
To conclude, we are flattered to have received the Ig Nobel Prize for Literature. Winners of these awards contribute to scientific work that “makes you laugh and then makes you think.” We hope that our work on the never-before-seen will inspire further research and delve deeper into the topic in the near future.
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