I had always thought it was only me. It’s amazing when you find out that you are not only alone but that what you are experiencing is something that has been quite common for a long time. What am I talking about? I am talking about when you get a word in your brain and when you keep saying it over and over again, it soon loses any meaning. It just sounds like a meaningless bunch of letters that you are pronouncing and it makes no sense at all. Well, there’s a word for that; actually two words. The term is semantic satiation.
Now this phenomenon has been around for a long time, but it was known by a variety of terms or just its description. It took a man by the name Leon Jakobovits James in 1962 when he called it this in his doctoral dissertation at McGill University.
But as I said, it goes back to the nineteenth century when Edgar Allen Poe talked about it in a short story called “Berenise”. James Thurber also described it in a 1933 short story, “More Alarms at Night”. And finally, William Faulkner mentions it in his novel, “As I Lay Dying”. All three authors had their protagonists mention or describe the activity – can I call it that? – in the course of the stories.
But why does it happen? Well, the experts say is that our brain gets tired saying it. That’s right. Each time we say a word, our brain cell uses up energy. The next time, if it hasn’t recovered yet, it is harder to get as much energy again. This repeats until the brain just can’t identify the word as originally it did, and it just becomes first a general idea, and then a jumble of vague sounds.
As bad as this sounds, there is a silver lining in all of this. Experts are using this in assisting persons who stutter to lose that close identity with a particular word, to the point where they can say it without stuttering.
The website Scienceabc.com has a very good explanation of this phenomenon as well as Wikipedia, though the latter is slightly more technical. Much of my information came from these two sites.
(Times New Roman 13)
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