My mantra don't work no more.

January 1, 2007 8:51 PM

When I was a kid, sometimes I would take a word (any word) and repeat it over and over in my head. After a few repetitions, the word would lose all meaning and sound strange and goofy, like it was a completely foreign word to me. Thing is, this doesn't happen anymore. I can repeat the word for hours and it just remains the original word. Has something happened to my brain?
posted by vronsky to grab bag (28 comments total)

For what it's worth, this is a noted phenomenon at my high school. Use a word too much in a paper, and it just becomes funny-looking gibberish. You know, "Hey niles, am I spelling fish right? It looks funny..."

So the first part, at least, is normal. I hope.

and I bet there's some overpaid reaserched somewhere who covers this exact topic.
posted by niles at 9:05 PM on January 1, 2007

researched -> researcher
posted by niles at 9:06 PM on January 1, 2007

I do this with a word occasionally, well less than occasionally. However, it's not uncommon at all that I read a word and it looks entirely foreign on the page. I read it fine, I understand it, I make sense of the context as normal, but it will look alien. Not just foreign as in another language, but entirely non word like, as if the writer just tossed some letters together and went with it.

Sometimes a word will stand out to the point that I actually stop reading and just think about how stupid it looks. Again, not stupid as in a spelling variation (I'm looking at you The UK!), but just a stupid selection of letters. I've spent more than a couple of minutes staring at one word on a page and wondering how we ever ended up with such a ridiculous combination of letters to represent a meaning. None of the words this happens with have any common thread and I don't ever remember doing this with the same word twice.

Got a academic library?

On the Lapse of Verbal Meaning with Repetition
M. F. Bassett, C. J. Warne
The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Oct., 1919), pp. 415-418
doi:10.2307/1413679
posted by Science! at 9:08 PM on January 1, 2007 [2 favorites]

I just found this with my academic library. I'm not a psychologist and I have nothing to do with language, so I don't know if these are solid or already debunked or unimportant or what.

Lapse of Meaning with Visual Fixation (in Minor Studies from the Psychological Laboratory of Cornell University)
V. J. Don; H. P. Weld
The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 35, No. 3. (Jul., 1924), pp. 446-450.
posted by Science! at 9:14 PM on January 1, 2007

Oh my God, all this time I thought I was absolutely bonkers for doing this. I never realised others did it too!

We're all bonkers, clearly.
posted by PuGZ at 9:39 PM on January 1, 2007

The term for this effect is "semantic satiation." I'm no neurolinguist, so I don't know the current state of research on it or where to look for an introduction, but Googling the phrase turns up some interesting pages.
posted by RogerB at 9:41 PM on January 1, 2007

I have suffered with writing a word many times, and it looking just weird. The worst was when I was doing a logo from my name - I was convinced that it couldn't be a proper word after about ten minutes.

Again, not stupid as in a spelling variation (I'm looking at you The UK!)

Um, surely the variation is English (US)? Just because you went and removed all the 'u's for efficiency, or whatever. And what's with all the 'z's?
posted by djgh at 9:43 PM on January 1, 2007

I always did this as a kid, but like you vronsky most, if not all words no longer sound strange. I could repeat any word in my head, even my name and it would sound strange and non-word like. Maybe it comes with growing older and having a brain full of stress.

Try the word Tangy. Does that do it?
posted by LoriFLA at 10:04 PM on January 1, 2007

Basically you're uncoupling the concept from the sounds that represent the concept. It can also happen with written words and, believe it or not, with ordinary objects (sleep deprivation helps). I suppose repetition is one way to trick your brain into doing it. Slowly, our concepts becoming heavily glued to the things that represent them. But I think with enough work you could get it to happen again. I once used a yoga book that called the exercises to do this "seeing simply". If I can remember the book, I'll post again here.
posted by ontic at 10:08 PM on January 1, 2007

This happened to me, and the most vivid example is the word "spicy." I was reading a comic book of the "Partidge Family" in the late 70s, and a Japanese fan (?) of the band was comparing a hot dog to Japanese cuisine, and I believe she exclaimed something like, "Ours is so spicy!" For some reason, the word SPICY simply began rolling around in my brain for hours, and it sounded absolutely absurd and did indeed lose all meaning.
posted by davidmsc at 10:18 PM on January 1, 2007

Once when I was little, I did this with my name, and then I got really scared. I thought I was going to think myself into oblivion.

Then I went to college and majored in linguistics, and though I am not a linguist, the explanation I got was something like this, colloquially: the part of your brain that has to get the meaning of the word gets tired of the part of your brain that gets the sounds calling wolf. So the getting-sounds part sends a message each time to the meaning-getting part, and the meaning-getting part hurrieshurries to get the meaning over to the other part that is receiving it. But if it happens too many times for the same sound sequence, the meaning-getting part says "This is lame, you're fucking with me and you don't really want the meaning so I'm not going to give it to you anymore."

And now languagehat and ikkyu2 will come explain how it really works.

But this really doesn't happen to you anymore, vronksy? I don't know what to tell you about that. Did you try really hard?
posted by librarina at 10:26 PM on January 1, 2007 [3 favorites]

"Tangy" not bad loriFLA. I can get a little bit of the sensation from repeating "shampoo" too, but like I said, when I was a kid, the sensation was just amazing.
posted by vronsky at 10:30 PM on January 1, 2007

That made perfect sense to me librarina. Good answer. And yes, I tried really hard.
posted by vronsky at 10:34 PM on January 1, 2007

Scuba. Scoooooba. Scoooba.

No idea what it is, but it's definitely interesting to temporarily come unglued from the web of language which normally anchors us so well in the world.
posted by Coda at 10:51 PM on January 1, 2007

Holy crap I do this all the time. Whatever it is that happened to your brain, I hope it doesn't happen to mine, because it usually leaves me in stitches on the floor. :)
posted by danb at 11:14 PM on January 1, 2007

If you can't do it with a single word try doing it with a whole sentence. Repeating the sentence over and over will achieve the same effect if you focus on the repetition and not on the meaning.

And yes, something probably has happened to your brain. Aliens.
posted by nixerman at 12:23 AM on January 2, 2007

Semantic satiation.

Semantic satiation.

Semantic satiation.

Semantic satiation.

Semant—whoops, heck yes, there it goes.

Still works for me.

*pulls out handkerchief, mops brow in relief*
posted by eritain at 2:17 AM on January 2, 2007

I used to do this when I was a kid too! I remember one day sitting at home, I must have been about nine years old, repeating the word "play" over and over, like you said. Then after a while the word just started to sound really silly, it too had lost all meaning. I can still do this now if I try hard enough.

Another thing I use to do is break words into syllables, and try and figure out why certain school songs would put a word into maybe one or two syllables, when, if you tried hard enough you could put it into three or for. For example, the word "picnic", being two syllables, I would break into four or five syllables - 'pi-k-ni-k'.

Now I speak Japanese, which is a syllable based language with no hard consenents. I often wonder whether this is a "purer" language form because of its simplicity. Anyway, I'm babbling now...
posted by Jase_B at 5:54 AM on January 2, 2007

I used to do that all the time. I remember sitting in a car at a gas station with a friend and her mother and just repeating "please" in my head over and over again, and then I couldn't figure out how to use the word right any more and I got incredibly scared I'd be impolite to my hosts.
posted by Glitter Ninja at 6:20 AM on January 2, 2007

And now languagehat and ikkyu2 will come explain how it really works.

I'll have to leave it to ikkyu2, since the psychology of language was never my thing. But this phenomenon still happens to me from time to time, and I'm in my mid-50s. I like librarina's explanation.
posted by languagehat at 7:40 AM on January 2, 2007

If you repeat a short tape loop of a speech fragment over and over while listening intently, after about 20 minutes it will sort of blossum, and you'll start hearing other words and phrases mixed in.
posted by StickyCarpet at 7:43 AM on January 2, 2007

I immediately thought of this segment from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. [YouTube link]
posted by inging at 8:39 AM on January 2, 2007

Ooh! Why not test StickyCarpet's idea with the music of Steve Reich?

He has some lovely pieces built around looped samples of people speaking one or two phrases. This is a snippet of one of the pieces I am thinking of.
posted by tiny crocodile at 8:56 AM on January 2, 2007

In particular, I remember having that problem with the word "ear" one time when I was in high school. It's funny but I definitely know what you're talking about though... I recently noticed that disconnect after repeating words doesn't really happen to me anymore either.

Ear. Ear. Ear. Ear. Yup... still means ear. How boring.
posted by miss lynnster at 9:06 AM on January 2, 2007

This happens/happened to me a lot.

But recently a weird thing happened. I was thinking of some close friends of mine, a family named Johnson. For some reason, even though I knew their last name was Johnson, coupling that with their first names did NOT sound right. I really thought I was losing my mind - people I have known for years, and suddenly my brain is rejecting their full names.

Weird.
posted by Bud Dickman at 9:16 AM on January 2, 2007

This used to happen to me, but I just shaked my head and it went away.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:27 AM on January 2, 2007

I've always referred to this as "Pepsodent syndrome" for the intuitive reason, though it's happened to me with other words as well... and yeah, since I've gotten older, not so much.
posted by baylink at 2:37 PM on January 2, 2007

I'm in my early twenties and this still happens to me a lot, although maybe less often than when I was younger - not sure. I have a very clear memory of being 8 years old and being totally weirded out by the word "groundhog" - I think it was Groundhog Day, and at school we had to write a story about a groundhog, and after I had written "groundhog" a few times it started to look very silly.
posted by naoko at 6:53 PM on January 2, 2007