Compare this with,
Did you ever feel while writing a word and contemplating on the spelling so long that it actually appears that such a word never existed. And this happens with even the most commonplace spellings such as "word" itself?
Do you feel as if something that your reason says cannot be true, but you feel as if you have never seen it before, like it came out of a total oblivion.
Try this and iam sure you will feel it to. But you must be free of any selfmanipulation while doing it and do it with open mind.
Take a piece of paper, start writing "word" continuously for 10 to 15 times.
Now at the end of writing the last time, you would feel that the spelling isnt correct and that it cant be "word" as you perceive it.
They have a word for it like Dejavu , see the wiki entry for this .
Often described as the opposite of déjà vu, jamais vu involves a sense of eeriness and the observer's impression of seeing the situation for the first time, despite rationally knowing that he or she has been in the situation before Jamais vu is more commonly explained as when a person momentarily does not recognize a word, person, or place that they already know.
Chris Moulin, of the University of Leeds, asked 92 volunteers to write out "door" 30 times in 60 seconds. At the International Conference on Memory in Sydney last week he reported that 68 per cent of the volunteers showed symptoms of jamais vu, such as beginning to doubt that "door" was a real word. It has also been said that a similar brain fatigue underlies a phenomenon observed in some schizophrenia patients: that a familiar person has been replaced by an impostor, they could be suffering from chronic jamais vu.
see this below explanation for this. ( wiki excerpt)
From a linguistic perspective, the phenomenon that a word after frequent repetition seems to lose its meaning is connected with the very nature of words. A word as a unit of language has three characteristics:
- It has form, i.e. it is shaped out of sounds or, in the case of written language, out of letters (characters).
- It has function, which (among other things) means that it operates in a meaningful sentence.
- It has meaning, which implies that it refers to a certain unit of thought (a concept or an idea) within a context.
However, when a word is repeated over and over again, it is in fact only the form which is repeated. There is no sentence, so the function of the word is eliminated. Its meaning, too, is effectively eliminated, because there is no context. A few repetitions will leave the language user's memory and expectation intact: he remembers the meaning and expects a meaningful reference. Continued repetition, however, will more and more foreground the word form to the exclusion of function and meaning, until the word literally "makes no sense". It is not the word that is being repeated, but only one of its aspects: the word form.
Interesting isnt it ?
3 comments:
yes.. interesting.. the form alone is what we are repeating hanh.. whatever.. i feel vacuum at the end of it :D
The moment I saw the word 'jamais vu' some how intuitively 'amnesia' came to my mind. Mind you, I am hearing/seeing this word for the first time and didn't go to wikipedia to look it up. But was quite sure I would find some reference to amnesia on the wikipedia for this word , and indeed it was the case ! :) . Call it deja vu ? :)
Anyway, deja vu has been experienced by me more often compared to this jamais vu. I can recollect only once or may be twice in my whole lifetime when I probably experienced it, and that too when I doubted the spelling of a certain word (don't remember what the word was, but i remember it as a very commonly used word). With modern editors and IDEs and MS Office programs that do auto spell check, you would never get the chance of doubting the spelling of a word you are typing :). And its very rarely that I ever use pen and paper to write something. Mostly to sign things.
And the day I doubt my own signature, I guess I will checkin to a hospital to get tested for Amnesia or Alzheimer's and won't write it off as Jamais Vu :-)
@Divya : ha ha !
@wishwaugh : Try the small test i suggested iam sure you will experience it
though may be slightly
and its not some disorder
as clearly explained its part of how brain processes language and its asosciation with objects and spellings all together
as i already noted, understanding these different forms in word/language, you can explain or understand to some extent the perpetual agony alzheimers and amnesia patients suffer.
Their forgetfulness is perpetual, unlike a person experiencing jamais vu!
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