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

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.