March 22, 2023 • 12 mins
You know when you read a word over and over it starts to lose its meaning? There’s a term for that and why it happens is fascinating.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for Dave. And this
is short stuff, short stuff that's right, all about something
that big thanks to mental floss dot co and how
emotions are made. But the big thing that happens to
a lot of people is when and for me, it
happens when I say a word out loud too many times.
(00:26):
I've never had the experience of writing a word too
many times. Oh really, no, I guess because I just
don't sit around and write the same word over and over.
But it's it's the idea that if you say something
or write something over and over, that word starts to
sound weird or look weird. Then it starts to completely
kind of fall apart. The more you do it to
(00:48):
the point where you're like, what even is driveway right?
And it becomes just a string of sounds or if
you're just seeing it visually, a string of letters. Yeah,
it's a phenomenon. It is. It's an actual thing. It's
called semantic satiation, and it's actually a kind of a
window into the way our brain works. I believe to
(01:10):
conserve energy. But we'll dive a little more into it.
The thing is, semantic satiation is not new. We've been
probably doing it ever since we've been speaking or writing words, right,
so saying bronze age, and it was first described. Semantic
satiation was first described in nineteen oh seven in the
(01:30):
American Journal of Psychology. Should I read it? I think
you should, because I think it gets it across really well.
All right, If a printed word has looked at steadily
for some little time, will be found to take on
a curiously strange and foreign aspect. This loss of familiarity
in its appearance sometimes makes it look like a word
in another language. Sometimes proceeds further until the word is
(01:54):
a mere collection of letters, and occasionally reaches the extreme
where the letters to themselves look like meaningless marks on
the paper. Right. So these psychologists who are describing it
back in nineteen and seven are basically focused on seeing
it written right again. That's how I've normally experienced it,
and the best way to experience it is to just
(02:15):
have one word, that one word typed out on paper, right,
because it's in isolation, and it quickly falls apart. But
they nailed something, I think in their description. It's a
loss of familiarity. It just doesn't it's not itself any longer.
And it's completely subjective to you because the person sitting
next to you might not be experiencing that while you are.
(02:38):
You're just lost in the sea of unfamiliarity. And the
word driveway just doesn't make sense anymore, right, And I
guess what I was saying was writing or typing it
over and over. You don't have to do that, even
that can just be looking at it yes on paper
over and over, because I was thinking it might make
sense in the first days of writing, when they were
(02:58):
using writing long hand to do like logging pounds of
wheat or whatever, like writing the same word over and
over might have done it. But that's not necessarily the case. No,
But it can happen like that, right. Yeah. So there's
a guy named Leon James. He's the guy who coined
the term semantic satiation. There's other terms for it, to
(03:19):
word decrement, it's gross extinction, reminiscence, a little too broad,
verbal transformation, that's a good one, but semantic satiation is
the one that everybody said, that's that's the one. Yeah,
And that happened in nineteen sixty two. He's a professor
or was at least a professor of psychology at the
University of Hawaii at their College of Social Sciences, and
(03:42):
he did some interesting I mean, he described it as
a he did some experiments we'll talk about in a minute,
but he described it in a way that also kind
of helps drive it home as a kind of fatigue, right. Yeah,
And basically, like he explains how when a sell fires,
it's going to take more energy for it to fire
the second and third time on down the line, and
once you get down to like the fourth time that
(04:03):
cell is firing, apparently it won't even respond unless you
wait a few seconds. And so I guess is he
likening that to the repetition of the word. Yeah, he's saying,
if you if you just expose yourself to the word
the first time, your brain's going to go through the
process of recalling all the memories and emotions and everything
attached that you have attached to that word. Right, And
(04:26):
then if you do that again, if you just think
or look at the same order here, the same word again,
it's gonna do it again. But it's gonna be like, Okay,
I don't know why we're doing this again. Third time,
it's gonna sigh heavily while it's doing it. The fourth
time it's just going to stand there with its arms
crossed and say, I'm not recalling any of this stuff.
And again, it's probably because the brain likes to conserve
(04:47):
energy as much as possible, and it's being presented with
the same stimulus over and over again, and it's like,
I've already, I've already done my job here. I don't
need to keep doing it. This is a waste of energy, literally,
And that processes is not applied just to semantic satiation.
Semantic satiation is a type of a larger phenomenon, which
(05:08):
is what I just described called reactive inhibition. And that's
the same thing that's behind going nose blind to the
smells in your house. That's a type of reactive inhibition too. Yeah,
which was the most disturbing thing I've learned ever on
the show. It is because it's not great to come
back to your house a week later and be like,
this is what my house really smells like. I know,
(05:28):
it's sort of that we just tend to live with
our head in the sand. I think that's how I'm
going to proceed on that one, because if not, then
what you just know your house smells like rotten dangerines
or something. All right, well, let's take a break and
we'll come back and talk a little bit more about
this after this. That's why we should know. But Josh Clark,
(06:12):
all right, here's a very fun thing that Leon James did.
He did a lot of different research on how this
can be applied on not just words but other things.
And I find this fascinating. And we'll jump back to
the stuttering thing. But the music charts, like the you know,
Billboard Top one hundred or whatever. Yeah, he studied this
(06:32):
and he found a correlation where songs that that really
hit the top of the charts really really fast also
went off the charts really really fast, and songs that
kind of work their way up the top one hundred
or whatever to the top ten, let's say, also faded
away very slowly. Fascinating. Yeah, it's basically semantic satiation is
(06:56):
a type of burnout, And you can burn out on
hearing the same thing in your brain being triggered by
it over and over again, and the thing that's going
to storm the charts is going to get the most airplaced.
Everybody's gonna get sick of it faster, it's gonna lose
its effect more quickly. That's a pretty clever way of
showing that by looking at the pop charts. Yeah, but
it's not just like the charts themselves that show it.
(07:17):
The songs, individual songs have that same effect. Anybody who's
listened to any song made by Journey now in twenty
twenty three knows that you can burn out on a
song after hearing it too many times. Yeah, it's sad,
but true. Journeys songs are so great. But if I
hear don't stop believing one more time, I'm gonna drive
(07:38):
my car into a traffic poll. Yeah, I had, especially
with classic rock, I have a lot of instances of
bands that I loved, loved, loved forever and then I
was just like, I can't hear it any of it anymore, right,
But then fifteen years later I'm back on it right right. Well,
that's another feature of semantic satiation. Like Leon James said,
(08:00):
if you're or the nineteen oh seven old timey psychologists said,
if you wait a little bit, it'll come back to you.
It's a temporary thing where your brain is like, oh okay,
I'm being presented with us again and it's new enough,
but you can also get easily burned out on that
same stuff even faster after it comes back that second time, Right, Yeah,
(08:21):
I think so. And classic rock is a great example
because that's the genre that refuses to go away, right,
And you know, it's one where you turn it on
any classic rock station and you're gonna hear that Journey
song or that Boston song that you just may not
be able to handle anymore that you used to love,
right exactly. What's interesting about it, though, is so like
(08:42):
the words themselves lose their meaning. They stop evoking the
emotion or the thought or the association or the conceptual
information that you attached to those words, and the words
become like musical notes. It's like the vocals become the
same thing as an instrument, like a guitar or something
(09:03):
like that. And if you stop and think about it,
like you know, all the words to don't Stop Believing,
but they rarely have that same well, I shouldn't say rarely.
It depends on the person, but it can very easily
not have any impact on you whatsoever. It's I mean,
it can still evoke emotion, but the words themselves aren't
making you think of what Steve Perry's saying. And Steve
(09:26):
Perry's actually a really good example of that because his
vocals are so melodious that it's very easy for them
to transition into music rather than words. You know, Yeah,
I mean, you can be a small town girl living
in a lonely world and still feel nothing when that
song comes up, if you've heard it too many times,
nothing except rage. I think it's interesting that words a
(09:51):
word can spark an emotion or be tied to an
emotion period, just like seeing a word on a piece
of paper. And they've used an example, I believe, like
you know, even seeing the word anger can like kind
of prime the pump for you to be angry. It
doesn't necessarily make you angry, but it can spark an
(10:11):
emotion in you to that sort of gets you headed
in that direction, right right, Yeah, Like you can be
primed to feel anger. Whereas if you're if you see
that word anger written down or something like that, and
something comes along that would make you angry, you're more
likely to become angry at that thing if you've seen
that word. So yeah, that whole semantic satiation thing reveals
(10:33):
that that fact that words have that effect, they have
emotional attachments, they can evoke emotions in us. Yeah, it's
pretty cool. I did mention stuttering at the beginning, and
we'll probably just close with this a little bit. Leon
James did. He's like, well, I wonder if I could
apply this to people who stutter, and let me do
this experiment while where I call people who have a
(10:55):
stutter over and over again all day long and talk
to them and see how much I can annoy them.
But what he found was the more he called, the
less they stuttered. So the stress of receiving that phone
call apparently seems like it had been satiated as well.
(11:16):
And yeah, that's not This probably the same thing as
semantic satiation. I think Chris is Leon James showing off.
I think so too. But what it basically shows is
it's the same thing as exposure. Like if you fly
in an airplane a bunch and you're afraid to fly,
you're going to become less afraid to fly over time.
One way to explain it is that you're showing yourself
(11:37):
there's actually nothing to be afraid of. Another one is
that you're actually stimulating that stress or that anxiety enough
times that your brains just like, forget about it. I'm done,
I'm satiated. Yeah, very interesting. It is interesting. The brain
is interesting, John, it certainly is well check agreed with me, everybody.
So I'm going to end on a high note and
(11:57):
say short stuff is out. Stuff you should Know is
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for Dave. And this
is short stuff, short stuff that's right, all about something
that big thanks to mental floss dot co and how
emotions are made. But the big thing that happens to
a lot of people is when and for me, it
happens when I say a word out loud too many times.
(00:26):
I've never had the experience of writing a word too
many times. Oh really, no, I guess because I just
don't sit around and write the same word over and over.
But it's it's the idea that if you say something
or write something over and over, that word starts to
sound weird or look weird. Then it starts to completely
kind of fall apart. The more you do it to
(00:48):
the point where you're like, what even is driveway right?
And it becomes just a string of sounds or if
you're just seeing it visually, a string of letters. Yeah,
it's a phenomenon. It is. It's an actual thing. It's
called semantic satiation, and it's actually a kind of a
window into the way our brain works. I believe to
(01:10):
conserve energy. But we'll dive a little more into it.
The thing is, semantic satiation is not new. We've been
probably doing it ever since we've been speaking or writing words, right,
so saying bronze age, and it was first described. Semantic
satiation was first described in nineteen oh seven in the
(01:30):
American Journal of Psychology. Should I read it? I think
you should, because I think it gets it across really well.
All right, If a printed word has looked at steadily
for some little time, will be found to take on
a curiously strange and foreign aspect. This loss of familiarity
in its appearance sometimes makes it look like a word
in another language. Sometimes proceeds further until the word is
(01:54):
a mere collection of letters, and occasionally reaches the extreme
where the letters to themselves look like meaningless marks on
the paper. Right. So these psychologists who are describing it
back in nineteen and seven are basically focused on seeing
it written right again. That's how I've normally experienced it,
and the best way to experience it is to just
(02:15):
have one word, that one word typed out on paper, right,
because it's in isolation, and it quickly falls apart. But
they nailed something, I think in their description. It's a
loss of familiarity. It just doesn't it's not itself any longer.
And it's completely subjective to you because the person sitting
next to you might not be experiencing that while you are.
(02:38):
You're just lost in the sea of unfamiliarity. And the
word driveway just doesn't make sense anymore, right, And I
guess what I was saying was writing or typing it
over and over. You don't have to do that, even
that can just be looking at it yes on paper
over and over, because I was thinking it might make
sense in the first days of writing, when they were
(02:58):
using writing long hand to do like logging pounds of
wheat or whatever, like writing the same word over and
over might have done it. But that's not necessarily the case. No,
But it can happen like that, right. Yeah. So there's
a guy named Leon James. He's the guy who coined
the term semantic satiation. There's other terms for it, to
(03:19):
word decrement, it's gross extinction, reminiscence, a little too broad,
verbal transformation, that's a good one, but semantic satiation is
the one that everybody said, that's that's the one. Yeah,
And that happened in nineteen sixty two. He's a professor
or was at least a professor of psychology at the
University of Hawaii at their College of Social Sciences, and
(03:42):
he did some interesting I mean, he described it as
a he did some experiments we'll talk about in a minute,
but he described it in a way that also kind
of helps drive it home as a kind of fatigue, right. Yeah,
And basically, like he explains how when a sell fires,
it's going to take more energy for it to fire
the second and third time on down the line, and
once you get down to like the fourth time that
(04:03):
cell is firing, apparently it won't even respond unless you
wait a few seconds. And so I guess is he
likening that to the repetition of the word. Yeah, he's saying,
if you if you just expose yourself to the word
the first time, your brain's going to go through the
process of recalling all the memories and emotions and everything
attached that you have attached to that word. Right, And
(04:26):
then if you do that again, if you just think
or look at the same order here, the same word again,
it's gonna do it again. But it's gonna be like, Okay,
I don't know why we're doing this again. Third time,
it's gonna sigh heavily while it's doing it. The fourth
time it's just going to stand there with its arms
crossed and say, I'm not recalling any of this stuff.
And again, it's probably because the brain likes to conserve
(04:47):
energy as much as possible, and it's being presented with
the same stimulus over and over again, and it's like,
I've already, I've already done my job here. I don't
need to keep doing it. This is a waste of energy, literally,
And that processes is not applied just to semantic satiation.
Semantic satiation is a type of a larger phenomenon, which
(05:08):
is what I just described called reactive inhibition. And that's
the same thing that's behind going nose blind to the
smells in your house. That's a type of reactive inhibition too. Yeah,
which was the most disturbing thing I've learned ever on
the show. It is because it's not great to come
back to your house a week later and be like,
this is what my house really smells like. I know,
(05:28):
it's sort of that we just tend to live with
our head in the sand. I think that's how I'm
going to proceed on that one, because if not, then
what you just know your house smells like rotten dangerines
or something. All right, well, let's take a break and
we'll come back and talk a little bit more about
this after this. That's why we should know. But Josh Clark,
(06:12):
all right, here's a very fun thing that Leon James did.
He did a lot of different research on how this
can be applied on not just words but other things.
And I find this fascinating. And we'll jump back to
the stuttering thing. But the music charts, like the you know,
Billboard Top one hundred or whatever. Yeah, he studied this
(06:32):
and he found a correlation where songs that that really
hit the top of the charts really really fast also
went off the charts really really fast, and songs that
kind of work their way up the top one hundred
or whatever to the top ten, let's say, also faded
away very slowly. Fascinating. Yeah, it's basically semantic satiation is
(06:56):
a type of burnout, And you can burn out on
hearing the same thing in your brain being triggered by
it over and over again, and the thing that's going
to storm the charts is going to get the most airplaced.
Everybody's gonna get sick of it faster, it's gonna lose
its effect more quickly. That's a pretty clever way of
showing that by looking at the pop charts. Yeah, but
it's not just like the charts themselves that show it.
(07:17):
The songs, individual songs have that same effect. Anybody who's
listened to any song made by Journey now in twenty
twenty three knows that you can burn out on a
song after hearing it too many times. Yeah, it's sad,
but true. Journeys songs are so great. But if I
hear don't stop believing one more time, I'm gonna drive
(07:38):
my car into a traffic poll. Yeah, I had, especially
with classic rock, I have a lot of instances of
bands that I loved, loved, loved forever and then I
was just like, I can't hear it any of it anymore, right,
But then fifteen years later I'm back on it right right. Well,
that's another feature of semantic satiation. Like Leon James said,
(08:00):
if you're or the nineteen oh seven old timey psychologists said,
if you wait a little bit, it'll come back to you.
It's a temporary thing where your brain is like, oh okay,
I'm being presented with us again and it's new enough,
but you can also get easily burned out on that
same stuff even faster after it comes back that second time, Right, Yeah,
(08:21):
I think so. And classic rock is a great example
because that's the genre that refuses to go away, right,
And you know, it's one where you turn it on
any classic rock station and you're gonna hear that Journey
song or that Boston song that you just may not
be able to handle anymore that you used to love,
right exactly. What's interesting about it, though, is so like
(08:42):
the words themselves lose their meaning. They stop evoking the
emotion or the thought or the association or the conceptual
information that you attached to those words, and the words
become like musical notes. It's like the vocals become the
same thing as an instrument, like a guitar or something
(09:03):
like that. And if you stop and think about it,
like you know, all the words to don't Stop Believing,
but they rarely have that same well, I shouldn't say rarely.
It depends on the person, but it can very easily
not have any impact on you whatsoever. It's I mean,
it can still evoke emotion, but the words themselves aren't
making you think of what Steve Perry's saying. And Steve
(09:26):
Perry's actually a really good example of that because his
vocals are so melodious that it's very easy for them
to transition into music rather than words. You know, Yeah,
I mean, you can be a small town girl living
in a lonely world and still feel nothing when that
song comes up, if you've heard it too many times,
nothing except rage. I think it's interesting that words a
(09:51):
word can spark an emotion or be tied to an
emotion period, just like seeing a word on a piece
of paper. And they've used an example, I believe, like
you know, even seeing the word anger can like kind
of prime the pump for you to be angry. It
doesn't necessarily make you angry, but it can spark an
(10:11):
emotion in you to that sort of gets you headed
in that direction, right right, Yeah, Like you can be
primed to feel anger. Whereas if you're if you see
that word anger written down or something like that, and
something comes along that would make you angry, you're more
likely to become angry at that thing if you've seen
that word. So yeah, that whole semantic satiation thing reveals
(10:33):
that that fact that words have that effect, they have
emotional attachments, they can evoke emotions in us. Yeah, it's
pretty cool. I did mention stuttering at the beginning, and
we'll probably just close with this a little bit. Leon
James did. He's like, well, I wonder if I could
apply this to people who stutter, and let me do
this experiment while where I call people who have a
(10:55):
stutter over and over again all day long and talk
to them and see how much I can annoy them.
But what he found was the more he called, the
less they stuttered. So the stress of receiving that phone
call apparently seems like it had been satiated as well.
(11:16):
And yeah, that's not This probably the same thing as
semantic satiation. I think Chris is Leon James showing off.
I think so too. But what it basically shows is
it's the same thing as exposure. Like if you fly
in an airplane a bunch and you're afraid to fly,
you're going to become less afraid to fly over time.
One way to explain it is that you're showing yourself
(11:37):
there's actually nothing to be afraid of. Another one is
that you're actually stimulating that stress or that anxiety enough
times that your brains just like, forget about it. I'm done,
I'm satiated. Yeah, very interesting. It is interesting. The brain
is interesting, John, it certainly is well check agreed with me, everybody.
So I'm going to end on a high note and
(11:57):
say short stuff is out. Stuff you should Know is
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
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