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Jamais vu all over again

Nature Neuroscience volume 20, pages 1194–1196 (2017)Cite this article

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What is the basis for the feeling that someplace or someone is familiar? Molas et al. have identified brain structures involved in signaling familiarity, a necessary element for the expression of preference for novelty.

Most of us have had the experience of encountering a person who looks familiar, yet we cannot recall having met. A related phenomenon is déjà vu, a vivid but inaccurate feeling that the current situation is familiar. This strong sense of familiarity occurs in the absence of any explicit evidence that the situation was previously encountered. Déjà vu is generally accepted to be a memory-based illusion resulting from a brief bout of anomalous activity in memory-related structures of the medial temporal lobe1. Jamais vu, sometimes regarded as the opposite of déjà vu, is the intense feeling that the current circumstances are novel and strange, despite the objective realization that they have indeed been previously experienced2. Both déjà vu and jamais vu occur in temporal lobe epilepsy3, as well as in normal individuals under ordinary situations. Compared with déjà vu, jamais vu is less common in normal populations and much more prevalent in some neuropsychiatric conditions; this difference in prevalence suggests that novelty and familiarity may be signaled by different brain pathways.

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Figure 1: A circuit-based mechanism for familiarity signaling and novelty preference.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

    Rebecca D Burwell

  2. the Department of Psychology, Providence College, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

    Victoria L Templer

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  1. Rebecca D Burwell
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  2. Victoria L Templer
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Correspondence to Rebecca D Burwell.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Burwell, R., Templer, V. Jamais vu all over again. Nat Neurosci 20, 1194–1196 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4625

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