We all know deja vu, we have probably experienced deja vu at some point or another. Well, have you ever heard of Jamais Vu, which is the opposite of this?

Jamais vu, which means “never seen” in French, is the opposite of the commonly known phenomenon of Deja vu. It is a memory error that causes something well known to feel unknown.

Have you ever been chatting with someone you know and suddenly felt like there was a stranger in front of you? Or have you ever walked on the path you always follow and suddenly felt like you were walking on that path for the first time? So, has a place you go to every day seemed like a foreign place to you? Have you ever been afraid that a sentence you wrote doesn't make any sense in your mind?

If your answer is yes, it means you have experienced Jamais Vu.

The Jamais Vu experience is rarer than deja vu and is essentially a more unusual and disturbing experience. During research on this subject, 98 selected people were tested and asked to repeat 12 randomly selected words. Participants were given the right to quit at any time. And 70% of participants said they quit because the words lost their meaning. Researchers analyzed this as the brain's method of self-protection. In the memory center called hippocampus in the brain, the dentate gyrus, which is the region responsible for instant memory, records something we see or experience like a computer. While doing this, it separates it into visual, auditory, temporal and many other models.

New incoming data also takes its place on this mental map. After the brain sees something being done the same way over and over again, it stops switching between parts of the brain to save energy and does not attribute any meaning to the action. This causes Jamais vu.

Have you ever experienced Jamais Vu before?