You’re looking at a person across a crowded room. Catching their eye, you feel a sense of familiarity and recognition that you can’t place. Maybe you’ve met before? Perhaps you’ve seen their picture in the paper? Suddenly you feel like, not only have you seen this person before, but you’ve already had this experience. History is repeating itself.

Either this is your groundhog day, or you’ve got a case of deja vu. You’re not alone. Seventy percent of people have had a deja vu experience at least once, if not multiple times. But did you know that there is more than one type of ‘vu’?

There are, in fact, a multitude from which your mind can choose at any given time.

If you’ve ever had a conversation and tried to recall a piece of information or word that you just can’t seem to find, you may have described it as ‘having something on the tip of your tongue’.

What you are experiencing is actually known as ‘presque vu’.

Essentially, it is the sensation of being on the brink of a mental breakthrough but being unable to fully express it. Personally, I love this term. Let’s be honest, saying ‘it’s on the tip of my tongue’ is nowhere near as sexy and mysterious as woefully exclaiming ‘I stand on the edge of epiphany, curse this abominable presque vu!’

In contrast to ‘deja vu’ and ‘presque vu’, ‘jamais vu’, (also known as ‘never seen’) is the psychological phenomenon in which something that should be familiar, isn’t.

These events are known as ‘distortion of perception’.

Less common than ‘deja vu’, ‘jamais vu’ is still reportedly experienced by between forty and sixty percent of the population. An example that most people can probably relate to, is that of seeing a commonly used or repetitive word and feeling like either you’ve never seen it before, or that something about it just doesn’t ‘look right’.

Try writing the word ‘ridiculous’ on a piece of paper fifty times. If, by the time you get to the fiftieth time of writing it, the word no longer looks like it is a real word, then you are experiencing ‘jamais vu’.

Your mind has become so overexposed to the repetition of stimuli (in this case the written word) that you subconsciously disassociate from it.

Whilst most occurrences of ‘jamais vu’ have little effect on day-to-day life, there are more extreme examples of phenomenons believed to have their roots in, or be linked to, the ‘jamais vu’ experience or similar feelings of memory disassociation.

For example, in ‘Capgras Delusion’, the phenomenon in which people believe friends, family or people they know to have been replaced by imposters.

I hope that you’ve found the ‘Dark Thoughts’ series as interesting to read as I have to research and write.

In the interests of keeping my blog as fresh and as interesting as possible, from next week I will be starting a new series. The study of psychology, human interaction and the way that the mind works has always been a great source of fascination for me. So I will continue to use it as base from which to seek out and share new topics.

I’ll be announcing the theme for my new blog series over the next few days.

Until then, be good to yourselves, your bodies and your minds.