Lost meanings

Have you ever noticed while speaking a word over and over again, that it starts to lose the sense of the meaning? Or how about when you are looking at a word repetitively and the letters start to look foreign to you. Does your brain conjure up questions as to who was the one to create that word? How about one single letter in the word? Or all of the letters transform into just extensions of lines, dashes and swoops.

This has been something that has happened to me my entire life. In my formative years, I found it fascinating that my perception of the words or letters and numbers would alter and change but I never really made anyone aware of my findings. I was already someone who thought differently than the rest of my peers, so I would sit and ponder as to why in a curious way. Not until recently did I speak of how words and letters lost the meanings after a time to a coworker of mine, which was sparked by the transformation of a word that was happening at that moment. My thoughts were taken aback to a memory of the night prior while watching “Ted Lasso.” My mind scurried and I took a chance and looked up a jumble of words to explain what was happening into Duck Duck Go (a search engine like Google). Throughout the list of results for findings similiar to and of “Semantic Satiation” appeared. It was the same words I heard the night prior that explained what was happening. I dug further and the results intrigued me. The words semantic satiation already was fun to say. The source looked to be legitimate, since it was from the American Pyschological Association so I proceeded.

What I had found was the perfect understanding of what was happening. “The term for this phenomenon is semantic satiation, which literally means that words become less meaningful as a function of repetition. Semantic satiation is a counterintuitive phenomenon in that repetition usually increases the availability of concepts.” Or in more layman’s terms, it is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when works are repeated over and over again, start to feel foreign and strange with losing all sense of the definition of the word.

In 1907 E. Severance and M.F. Washburn described the phenomenon in The American Journal of Psychology but the term wasn’t coined until 1961 when Leon James and Wallace E. Lambert wrote the article “Semantic Satiation Among Bilinguals,” again, in The American Journal of Psychology.

Seeing this phenomenon being reported in psychological studies, articles and research papers helps put my mind at ease a little; that there are others who may stumble into the world of mystery in search for more than meets the eye, or ear in this case.

“’Semantic satiation’ is a metaphor of sorts, of course, as if neurons are little creatures to be filled up with the word until their little bellies are full, they are sated and want no more. Even single neurons habituate; that is, they stop firing to a repetitive pattern of stimulation. But semantic satiation affects our conscious experience, not just individual neurons.”

(Bernard J. Baars, “In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind.” Oxford University Press, 1997)

Seeking

W

onder

edia