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.
This makes sense, but it reminds me a lot of how we filter out sensations after so long (i.e., we can't smell a bad odor after a certain amount of time, or we stop noticing a certain annoying sound after so long).
I cannot remember or find the term for this but iirc it's Psych 101.
Lay down in bed, looking at the ceiling, the main light just to the side of your central vision. And the lamp disappears (until your move your eyes) :-)
Exactly. Say you are standing on the side of an empty road. You'll certainly notice the first car that passes, maybe the second and the third. As the traffic intensifies, you'll eventually stop noticing the individual cars and assume they are part of the background.
I would add that it’s almost all stimuli. One could only wish that pain worked this way (unfortunately, no matter how many body parts hurt, it doesn’t mean only the one that hurts the worst is the only one that appears to hurt).
Sorry I am trying to contact you in a non traditional way but I need your advice on something very important. My mom (53Y) got diagnosed with stage 3c ovarian cancer recently. The surgery has been done and chemo started 3 days back.
I saw your comment on the HN post which is around 3 years old where you mentioned your wife took part in clinic trial for atezolizumab.
Fingers crossed. I hope you guys are doing ok. I need to learn more about the treatment. I would be grateful to you for any advice/help you can give me. I don’t know your email id. My email id is anuragvermaknn@gmail.com.
Hey buddy I'll send you a note out of band tonight. This space moves incredibly quickly and I don't know what things look like these days in terms of trials. We didn't have a good outcome ultimately but there is some evidence that my wife should have been staged at IV not IIIC. I'm still incredibly confident in the role that immunotherapy will play in cancer therapy, and it's likely that there have been advances since we had a go at it.
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.
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.
Sometimes the simplest search is the most effective!
And you're welcome. (I was taking a complicated job application test where you had to recognize the color of a word and click the word that spelled the color. Everything was red or blue. As you can imagine...)
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 was listening to a podcast with Jason Sudeikis and he said that they specifically brought it up several times because they knew that later in the same episode they would be doing a riff on the Allen Iverson "we talking about practice" speech.
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)
In college (undergrad and grad school) I did a lot of graphics programming and color lost all meaning on many occasions. It wasn't the whole variable name (well, typically, maybe on occasion but not normally) but often things like BackgroundColor or ForegroundColor and so on. On many busy coding days at some point I'd just see this word scattered about the screen and have to convince myself that it was in fact the correct word and used correctly and spelled correctly (though perhaps British English speakers would disagree on the spelling).
I haven't experienced it in quite a while, though. And I don't do any graphics programming anymore anyways so when that word shows up in my code it's usually in the very minimal bit of GUI programming I touch anymore. I'm not sure any other word ever gave me quite as much trouble.
At $WORK the word "leverage" is used as a verb so frequently, usually with no meaning other than "use", that it begins to sound like noise. A sort of grunt that must be periodically uttered, from time to time, to indicate the speaker is a member of the glorious tribe of passionate, devoted $WORK employees, like a radio callsign periodically interrupting a transmission to assure the listener of the station's identity. What scraps of meaning it still clung to -- even as a buzzword -- began to fade.
I have resolved to assiduously use "use" when I mean "use".
Damn, that's a shame. Leverage deserves much better treatment than that. It's an amazing concept. "To use" has some interesting points to it as well, but eh...
Verbally is how I experience it exclusively as in not like saying it aloud but more like uttering it to myself internally if that makes sense. I should log this when it happens next time. Usually I happen to be mentally reciting/picturing* a word syllabically and not alphabetically and for a span of 3-4 seconds it feels utterly alien. Happens with the simplest words like colour, market etc.
I don’t remember experiencing semantic satiation while reading, and it’s been awhile otherwise. Used to happen as a young person what feels like often but may only be a handful of times.
My best effort to recreate. You need 2 spaces in front of each line in order to get code blocks which will preserve your ASCII art.
If you can still edit your original, your line breaks and spacing should be preserved in the raw form so you'd only need to add the spaces in front of each line to get your version showing correctly.
Literally every conversation I have about blockchain.
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.
Ha, that's interesting. But have you come across the AI-linked crypto, ML Blockchain? It's completely distributed and secure blockchain through crypto. The ML is blockchain which blockchain crypto blockchain, blockchain sec blockchain distributed blockchain blockchain AI blockchain blockchain. Blockchain blockchain blockchain, blockchain bLoCkChAiN BlOcKcHaIn bLoCkChAiN BlOcKcHaIn bLoCkChAiN BlOcKcHaIn bCkOlcAnIh
Was just trying to parse that as a new brainfuck dialect called blockchain, which encodes the 8 brainfuck instructions in camelcase strings of the word blockchain, but just resembles a normal conversation about blockchain.
I recently wrote a song that took a brainfuck program and set it as lyrics to a dance track because I had a suspicion Daftpunk's 'Work It' was a similar program. It started as a way to encode bf programs as lines from Rick Astley's 'never gonna give you up,' but I got lazy.
