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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Our brain does not save words and their meaning in a dictionary. It does not remember words with other words.
Brains save with pictures and they might look a bit different. So when you remember the word-picture your brain saved for you, it might look odd.
You need to overwrite the picture with another and update it. This, sadly is not as easy as the first time around.
There is a thing called Auditory Processing Disorder that is a more severe form of this. someone might say the sky is blue today, but you hear ” the Car is elephant today”
It seems to be tied into dyslexia and ADHD and mostly effects children, although there is a small percentage of Adults that have it. It might also be related to visual glitches as well I.E. seeing red as green or seeing a far thing and thinking it is close……
Rule 2. You can find this on Wikipedia.
Rule 7: Search before posting.
The term is *semantic satiation*.
Most of the top comments are correct that there are theories and ideas behind it. What I think is the case in ELI5 language:
The more we say something the less we think about the meaning behind the word and the more we focus on the sound.
We start to see “apple” as the sounds “ap” + el” and less the idea behind it (fruit, colour, sound, taste, etc).
I have a fond memory of my wife saying “Cheerio Bowl” over and over while she was drunk. She couldn’t stop laughing at how it sounded!
When I was younger, I once thought about the word “dog” in Hebrew (I’m Israeli) and how it has nothing to do with dogs
“Kelev” doesn’t mean anything of you don’t decide that it does, and we Israelies keep the tradition of assigning that sequence of sound the meaning of “dog” (which itself has no meaning despite 2 totally foreign languages using the word “dog” for that animal)
I do this with the expression “how come?”. A question asked very frequently yet if you look at it for long enough starts to look weird and I wonder why these two words together mean what they mean??
Meaning is applied to the words, it’s not inherent. So I’m guessing it has something to do with that. The word and the meaning that we apply to it are two separate things.
Because it becomes repetitive so the mind disassociates with the subconscious content related to the word.
Take hearing a foreign language for instance, the first time you hear Konichiwa it sounds really weird, but by the 10,000th it feels comfortable.
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*…)
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