The opposite of déjà vu gets far less attention: a familiar face, word, or place suddenly striking you as wrong, alien, or unreal, even though you know perfectly well it isn't. Psychologists call it jamais vu – literally, "never seen." Unlike déjà vu, which most people experience at some point, jamais vu is rarer, and rarer still to talk about. The award was for figuring out how to trigger jamais vu on demand, in a lab, using nothing but a pen and paper. If that holds up in living brains, it suggests jamais vu doesn't start with your brain losing faith in what a word means.