[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.
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 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.
When you speak a sentence.
Your brain is doing a complex task; connecting a bunch of phonetically different sounding words to convey an idea.
Phonetically different sounding is key here. Human brains have become very good at pattern recognition, when a human speaks or hears a sentence the brain detects the differences in phonetic sounds from word to word and that helps convey an idea.
Because the brain is always trying to understand ideas through pattern recognition, when a word is spoken over and over the brain doesn’t have any other phonetic sounds to compare it to, so it becomes apparent that the word has no actual meaning and that it is just a sound we make with our mouth.
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