semantic satiation

Have you ever experienced the feeling that a word is losing its meaning?  When you say a word over and over, the meaning seems to fade with each repetition until the word is just a set of jumbled sounds, signifying nothing.  This can happen by accident in conversation when each person repeats the topic under discussion, maybe each one of them saying it a number of times, until finally the person listening loses all sense of what the discussion is about.

The name for this phenomenon is slightly clunky and was coined by an American academic, Leon Jakobovits James, in his doctoral dissertation in 1962.  The idea is that, while we might expect repetition to reinforce a response in our brain, in fact it weakens it.  We hear a word, the brain processes it, and then it doesn’t really want to do it again. Not immediately.  This is an inhibiting factor in the processing of the word the next time round.  And so it goes until we get to meaninglessness.

The same thing can happen when you stare at a word or phrase for too long.  You see it, your brain takes it in, and then it is less and less inclined to process the meaning after that.  Ultimately you find yourself looking at strange shapes with no meaning whatsoever.