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
This happened to me, when I said my husband’s name. I just called him Babe for a while. Lol
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.
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.
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.
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