The eerie ‘opposite of déjà vu’ phenomenon that leaves people so unsettled it gives them chills

Déjà vu is a well known phenomenon a lot of us experience where we get the feeling we’ve seen or done something before.

But there is another occurrence that is the “opposite of déjà vu” and it’s left people feeling so unsettled that it’s given them chills.

It’s called jamais vu and it means the experience of feeling unfamiliar with something that is actually very familiar to you.

Jamais vu is an occurrence where something familiar suddenly feels unknown (Catherine Falls Commercial/Getty Images)

The phenomenon is rarer than déjà vu so it could feel even more unnerving to experience it.

That’s according to Christopher Moulin, a professor of cognitive neuropsychology, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), and Akira O'Connor, a senior lecturer in Psychology at the University of St Andrews.

They wrote about their findings in The Conversation after conducting an experiment with 94 students.

For their study, they got participants to repeatedly write out the same word over and over again as quickly as possible.

While some eventually stopped writing due to things like boredom or an achy hand, the most common reason was that they reportedly felt strange.

The experiment saw participants writing out the same word repeatedly (damircudic/Getty Images)

In fact, 70% of them gave that as their reason for stopping and Moulin and O’Connor have called the experience jamais vu.

In their report, the pair gave some examples of jamais vu, which include looking at something that’s familiar to you but suddenly finding it to be unknown or seeing it through new eyes.

People who took part in the experience described how the words they were repeatedly writing started to lose their meaning the longer they stared at it.

Some began to doubt they were spelling it correctly even though they knew the word was spelt right.

Jamais vu has left people feeling unsettled (Xavier Lorenzo/Getty Images)

The authors of the study have said that the phenomenon of jamais vu helps us to “snap out of our current processing, and the feeling of unreality is in fact a reality check.”

They went on to add: “It makes sense that this has to happen. Our cognitive systems must stay flexible, allowing us to direct our attention to wherever is needed rather than getting lost in repetitive tasks for too long.”

However, this isn’t the first time that an experiment has been conducted to find out more about jamais vu.

Back in 1907, an American psychologist named Margaret Floy Washburn held her own experiment with one of her students where she also found that when words are stared at for three minutes, there is a “loss of associative power”.