Why do words start to look weird the longer you stare at them?
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**Your brain prioritizes things that are new, unfamiliar, or have recently changed.** It learns to ignore the stuff it is bored with. With words this is called “semantic satiation.”
Your brain is constantly taking in a ton of information. It needs to decide what is and isn’t important.
It prioritizes new and interesting things, because it thinks those are most likely to be a threat or an opportunity to you.
(Tree that looks like every other tree in the forest = not likely to kill you, so your brain doesn’t pay close attention to each branch and leaf. Tiger lurking in the trees = your brain is going to be _very concerned_, and hopefully will immediately notice the new object among the boring trees.)
To make room for those new interesting things, it starts to ignore things you’ve been looking at / smelling / feeling continuously.
It’s similar to the “nose blindness” effect, where you can’t really smell your own house or your own BO. While annoying sometimes, it’s useful — your brain wants to prioritize potentially dangerous smells, like a sudden plume of smoke or gas.
(From an evolutionary standpoint… creatures whose brains _didn’t_ excel at this process didn’t notice the tiger or the plume of smoke… so they died… so they didn’t reproduce. Those of us who are around today are more likely to have brains that ignore boring stuff and notice scary or exciting stuff.)
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