I hope this makes sense
Like when you’re taking notes and you write a word and it just doesn’t seem spelled correctly no matter what or it just seems strange, or when you say a word and it feels weird coming out and you have difficulty comprehending that it’s an actual word.
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[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation)
It’s called semantic satiation. I don’t think we know the real answer, but there are some ideas. One is that repeatedly activating whatever neural patterns represent a word causes the brain to inhibit that pattern. This could happen to the sound itself (the recognition of the sound of the word) OR the actual meaning of the word in the brain. But yeah, I don’t think we have conclusive answers.
Words are ultimately arbitrary, there’s no particular reason for any given word to have a given meaning other than at some point, enough people agreed on it.
Onomatopoeia are somewhat of an exception, but most words have no intrinsic meaning.
I think this could be what some refer to as emptiness.
It’s seeing the color blue, without thinking “blue” in your head.
Everything we interact with has an “essence” attached to it. Essence of blue might be: ocean, depression, tie I wore to prom, high school colors, etc. In my mind, those things all jumble up and are attached to the sight or thought of “blue”. If I cloud look at the color blue without thinking those things, I would just be experiencing the visual of it, without any further understanding or assessment.
If you hear the word “blue” and your mind doesn’t attach the usual “essence of blue” to it, then you’re only experiencing a sound. No further understanding or assessing. Just someone making a sound. And that can feel weird.
You might be suffering from neurological disorders, worth getting a neurological diagnosis from neurologist, most likely signs of minor or progressive epilepsy.
There are all sorts of things that happen in your brain to connect a word to its sound, meaning, or an object that you see; these all activate different pathways in your brain. When there are more serious things that go wrong (like brain injury / damage), you can get various forms of [aphasia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphasia) and [verbal agnosia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_verbal_agnosia). Sometimes focusing on one aspect of a word (like its sound or spelling) makes it hard to activate another aspect of a word (like its meaning or an object it represents), because they emphasize those different neural pathways- it’s like trying to consciously pat your head and rub your belly at the same time, when you would normally do these things automatically and unconsciously.
I get this but with brand/company logos. It’s weird. Like the more I look at one the more foreign it becomes
I have this exact problem with the word “hamper”. The more I repeat it the more foreign it sounds to me. Try it.
Reminds me of a scene in How I Met Your Mother where Ted realizes that repeating a word too many times makes it sound super weird (“bowl…. Bowl…. *bowl*…)
Thank you for this. I thought I was losing intelligence it turns out that this is common. Wow, I’m blown away.
Just keep going. Any telemarketer can tell you that all words lose meaning eventually. It’s not that they sound foreign, they lose all interest or meaning.
I could recite a 3 page script without caring about the meaning of any sentence or word
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