Psychologists call the term "jamevu" a phenomenon in which a person perceives a familiar situation as if he had encountered it for the first time. Familiar objects and people, familiar environment for a few minutes become for him things from the category of "well forgotten old".
Quite often, the phenomenon of jamevu (from the French jamaisvu - “never seen”) is compared to short-term memory loss. Symptomatically, the phenomena are indeed similar, although if you delve into the neurophysiological subtleties of the issue, striking differences emerge between these concepts.
Firstly, the state of jamevu “covers” a person completely suddenly and for no reason, while memory loss (even short-term) always has physiological reasons (trauma, shock).
An example of a typical jamevu: during a conversation with a close friend, in some inexplicable way, all information about him seems to be erased from memory for several minutes. And a well-known person is perceived as the first comer. After a while, everything falls into place. This, in fact, is the phenomenon - it has no obvious prerequisites and no consequences. After the release of the film "The Matrix" even doctors half-jokingly began to call the phenomenon of jamevu (as well as deja vu) "a failure in the matrix."
The second key difference: with loss of memory, a person forgets anything and anyone, any episode from a past or present life. The jamevu phenomenon, on the other hand, concerns only the fact that “here, now and this is exactly”. For example, a person observes a landscape that has been familiar to him for a long time and suddenly “forgets” it for a short time.
The eyes continue to transmit information about what they see to the brain, and the brain “turns off” for a while from accepting this information. Sometimes something similar happens with computer systems, and then it is accompanied by expressions like "freeze, infection!". A person in a state of jamevu is, in a way, the same "hovering".
The phenomenon of jamevu, as well as the opposite phenomenon of déjà vu, remains a mystery to scientists to this day. First of all, the difficulty of studying these phenomena lies in the fact that they cannot be created artificially or simulated in laboratory conditions.
However, some modern neurophysiologists tend to explain both phenomena by inconsistencies in the interaction of two parts of the brain that are responsible for memory and perception of information. Unlike déjà vu, the jamevu phenomenon is ten times less common in humans.
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