Okay, I don't know, let's just see. Oh, I felt this one. Okay, this is from ScienceAlert.com, which I've never heard of before. And it's from January 12, 2024. Doesn't say who's written it, but it is co- Oh no, it's by humans. The opposite of deja vu is a thing. And it's even more uncanny. Our petition has a strange relationship with the mind. Take the experience of deja vu when you wrongly believe you have experienced a novel situation in the past, leaving us with a spooky sense of past...
Well, that's presumptuous of them, making them think that we don't know that we've experienced this before. When you wrongly believe that that last sentence was a wild ride. Have you ever experienced a sense of pastness? It just kept going. I really like that. Huh, I'm remembering this. It's wrong, but I'm remembering it. Yes, I'm experiencing pastness. But we have discovered that deja vu is actually a window into the workings of our memory system. What is this website?
Our research found that the phenomenon arises when the part of the brain which detects familiarity asynchronous with reality. Deja vu is the signal which alerts you to this weirdness. It is a type of fact checking for the memory system. Repetition can do something even more uncanny and unusual. The opposite of deja vu is jamais vu. When something you know to be familiar feels unreal or novel in some way. In our recent research, which has just won an IG Nobel award for literature, we invest...
Big Nobel. They're the offshoot of the Nobel Prize. They always have papers that they award prizes to. Wow, I'm learning so many new things in this article. We investigated the mechanism behind the phenomenon. Ja me vu may involve looking at a familiar face and finding it suddenly unusual or unknown. Musicians have it momentarily, losing their way in a very familiar passage of music. You may have had it going to a familiar place and becoming disoriented or seeing it with new eyes.
Is that the same as like when you say a word over and over again and then it loses all meaning? I think so, yeah. It has to be. It's an experience which is even rarer than deja vu and perhaps even more unusual and unsettling.
When you ask people to describe it in questionnaires about experiences in daily life, they give accounts like, well, writing in my exam, 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. Yeah. In daily life, it can be provoked by repetition or staring, but it needn't be. Yeah, okay, I get this. I've had this happen before. It's just what I said. If you say a word too much, then it loses all meaning.
Or you know, going into a room and you're like, why the hell did I come into this room and then leaving? Yeah. Okay. Apparently that happens to be way too much. One of us, Akira, has had it driving on the motorway. Necessity necessities necessitating necessitating necessitating necessitating that he pull over on the hard shoulder to allow his unfamiliarity with the pedals and the steering wheel to reset. The wild is rare. Oh man, that's a Tim Robinson sketch. Is it? Oh yeah.
Where he's like, do you even know how to drive? And he's like, no, I don't. I don't even are these things. Yeah, Jumevu. Yeah. We don't know much about Jumevu, but we guessed it would be pretty easy to induce in the laboratory. If you just ask someone to repeat something over and over again, they often find it becomes meaningless and confusing. This was the basic design of our experiments on Jumevu. In a first experiment, 94 undergraduates spent their time repeatedly writing the same word.
They did it with 12 different words, which range from the commonplace such as door or less common such as sword. We asked participants to copy up the word as quickly as possible, but told them they were allowed to stop and gave them a few reasons why they might stop, including feeling peculiar, being bored or their hand hurt. Stopping because things are... I like that one.
Stopping because things began to feel strange was the most common option chosen, with about 70% stopping at least once for feeling something defined as Jumevu. This usually occurred after about one minute, 33 repetitions, and typically for familiar words. In a second experiment, we used only the word the, figuring that it was the most common. This time, 55% of people stopped writing for reasons consistent with our definition of Jumevu, but only after 27 repetitions.
But nobody actually knows what the word me means. Like I don't. Do you? It's just there. No, it doesn't have meaning. Why do we even use that? I gotta take it out of my vocabulary. Makes no sense. You go fast now. People describe their experiences as ranging from they lose their meaning or the more you look at them, you seem to lose control of hands. I just lost control of my hand. I had to stop. To our favorite, it doesn't seem right.
Almost looks like it's not really a word, but someone's tricked me into thinking it is. What? Someone sounds crazy. It took us around 15 years to write up and publish the scientific work. Well, that's a long time. In 2003, we were acting on a hunch that people would feel weird while repeatedly writing a word. This is just going, they're elaborating on something I feel they shouldn't at this point. Yes, it's almost as if they're repeating themselves so we lose what's going on in this story.
Meaning. I just had noticed that the lines he had been asked to repeatedly write as punishment at secondary school made him feel strange as if they weren't real. I don't know. I think we went to be enough on this. That was kind of an interesting article, even though I want to, what was it? Ig Nobel. There's always fun stuff in there. They have different subcategories. They do it every year. Yeah, I would assume like the Nobel Prize, right? Yeah, exactly.
And if we say that enough times, it'll lose all meaning. And I think that's good enough for a mini. Yeah, I think so too. I'm glad we have a word for that because I'm going to forget it when I need it, but it comes up more often than we would like. I think as we all get older, we do know there's a word so we can just say, there's a word for this and I can't remember what it is. And if you just keep saying it, it's going to completely lose its meaning.
And my hands feeling like it's writing out a control, but this is happening and I know what it is, but that's all we need to know. All right. Well, in any event, hopefully you guys remember that you need to be here in 48 hours. That's non-negotiable. There are repercussions if you're not. So I guess you'll be here in 48 hours. Bye.