That seems to be an example of our general tendency of treating all stimuli relative to their surroundings (both spatially, in time, and in abstract sense). A word's meaning only matters in contrast to other words combining it into some composite expression. If no such expression comes up, the brain tries to break down the word and look at a lower level.
Thank you for sharing this. I read about this on Wikipedia a decade or so ago and for the life of me couldn’t find it again. All I could remember was that G.K.Chesterton was mentioned in the Wikipedia article and tried many times to google his name with different keywords (‘Chesterton words repetition’ etc)to no luck whenever this phenomena happened with me.<p>PS:
Chesterton isn’t mentioned in the current version of this article but I see a lot of hits when I search his name with semantic satiation.
This happens to me when programming. A common term like "array" will jump out at me and I'll think "...that doesn't look right"<p>I saw a term for it many years ago and have googled for it many times since then. Thanks to annowiki for posting this!
Now, after 25 years or so, I finally know how it's called! I remember, as a kid, I found out that if I repeat a word often enough, it stops being registered
as a word, suddenly it's just a bunch of unrelated sounds. It amused me but I never shared it with anyone, and, turns out, there's even a term for it (and a lot of research). It's one of those things that happen to many people but rarely talked about; post-nasal drip and blue field entoptic phenomenon also come to mind.
I've noticed that, when replaying an audio clip of a word or phrase repeatedly (like when "deciphering" something in a foreign language), after a few repetitions it no almost longer sounds like speech, but just some rhythmic sound.
anyone have any favorite examples of one-word variable or method names that have caused this for you? (where you type it over and over and eventually you start to question if it's really a word at all)
illustration of this that was clear enough that i got it at age 10<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT3vOCWA-J0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT3vOCWA-J0</a>
My all time favourite example of this <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DySPDmCHgw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DySPDmCHgw</a>
My satirical take on this phenomenon in physics: <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.12201" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.12201</a>
Literally every conversation I have about blockchain.<p>Only half joking. Having worked in security and crypto, the solutions are often based on an opaque idea of fantastic complexity, which becomes a kind of mantra. It's like being in a movie called blockchain john malkovitch.