Why do we sometimes say a word or look at a word so many times that it sounds foreign/doesn’t look like a real word?

Question

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.

In: Other

Answer 1

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.