Lost in Repetition: The Fascination of Semantic Satiation
You’re not losing your mind; your brain just shut down
Publisher’s note: This is a guest post from my wonderful friend Maryan Pelland. If you are a writer and wish to improve your craft, then I recommend your very next stop be Maryan’s Pen2Profit substack.
Her posts are helpful, always interesting, and accurate in a way you’ll appreciate. I thought I knew the rules of writing well. I regularly learn something new from Maryan.
I looked into cortical inhibition because a highly regarded storyteller, Kenny Minker, waxes philosophical about the time he was labeled a gringo in a video. He wrote a great story that explains a lot about the word and about how words can bring offense. As I read it, I became uber-aware of the word. Gringo. And hence, cortical inhibition — stand by, I’ll explain.
Gringo. What’s happening to you right now is that you’re aware of the word gringo, and I only typed it three times. Keep going. Gringo. Gringo. GRINgo. Grrrrrinnnngggo. Pretty soon, you’ll start laughing, and then you’ll have to stop for a moment to remember what the word means. Gringo.
It stops sounding like a word, and it stops making sense.
There’s a term for that psychological phenomenon — it’s semantic satiation, whereby repetition causes a word to lose meaning. The listener takes the word in as meaningless sounds. It happens in reading, too — staring at a word or reading it over and over causes satiation or semantic saturation.
A number of terms have been applied to this weirdness (you know I love to explore words):
word inhibition
refractory phase and mental fatigue
lapse of meaning
work decrement
cortical inhibition
extinction
reactive inhibition
Regardless of the label, it actually happens to all of us, and it happens often.
Who figured this out?
The consensus is that some guys named Severance and Washburn first looked into the idea formally in 1907. I’m guessing they got a grant to study this phenom, and had a great time making it seem relevant and important while they collected their grant money.
However, I can’t imagine that in say Biblical times, or Shakespeare’s era, or any other human era, not a single person ever stood around in the yurt or the castle telling a long story and finding herself repeating yurt over and over until it sounded real funny.
I have to think even Willie himself had a momentary lapse of dignity when he said mouldy rogue a few times and noticed how amusing that was. Of course, we know that present-day man isn’t the only group that ever got high, and what could be funnier than semantic satiation when you’re baked?
Anyway, Severance and Washburn and those who followed in their footsteps decided that repetition fires off the neural process in the brain that connects a word to a meaning — and it continues to fire like a machine gun.
Sooner or later, the brain’s response lessens, and the word-search function is inhibited. The response, which is the brain putting meaning to the word, slows down. Then, gringo starts to sound and look unfamiliar — there’s no connection to its meaning.
The same thing happens when you jump into a cold swimming pool. At first, your brain makes you shriek and shudder, and if you can stand to stay in the pool, little by little, you become less aware of the discomfort. See?
Some brilliant brain guy said that when the brain cell fires a second time for the same reason, it takes more energy to complete that connection, then still more the third time, and so forth. Soon, there is no response because your brain wants you to stop goofing off and wasting its energy.
What’s this semantic satiation good for?
From a writer’s point of view, makes some repetitive writing seem marginally less boring. For example, overuse of charged words—words with intense associations like profanity—is often peppered liberally through stories or essays. The F-bomb is one. If a writer spams f*ck often enough, the word can fall victim to semantic satiation and become invisible, or at least pointless. A benefit for readers, I’m sure.
Semantic satiation can reduce stuttering.
Marketers are rethinking sales rhetoric, having noticed that repeating a catchphrase too often renders it useless. How many times have you heard black Friday in advertising? Or limited time only? You’ll see those less often now because they’ve become as ubiquitous as smiley faces and no one sees them anymore.
Language teachers use satiation to help learners ignore meanings while they focus on muscle movements needed to form a given word.
We’re done now
Semantic satiation, like chocolate satiation, is temporary. You can cure it by distracting your brain. Take a nap, or a walk, or eat a Snickers. Your brain discards the process and resets until next time.
So, you see, it’s not all nonsense. It might well be a fine idea to think about how you might leverage it. There are serious, therapeutic reasons to babble words over and over. That’s nice to know. But still, it’s cool to act like a village idiot and repeat bubble gum thirty times. Maybe it’s a weird way to meditate? I wouldn’t practice it in public, though.
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Do you think this principle is at play in the loss of meaning of words in public discourse as well? I'm thinking of the overuse of racist, fascist, Hitler, etc. These have been thrown around with such frequency, and in so many inappropriate places, that they've become caricatures.
My favorite childhood example is "super" in the 1970s, everything was so "super" until "super" really had little meaning. Later it was "cool" and "bad" - whatever that meant to the speaker's in-group at that moment. "Cool" and "bad" actually became a joke by the late 1980s when people realized that they had become meaningless, as reflected in songs from Huey Lewis and others.
As to the origin of a sort of alienation from words by overthinking, I recall that St. Augustine discussed it in On Christian Doctrine, saying if you think about a word, you will find that you don't really know what the word means (St. Augustine was a rhetoric teacher in Milan before moving to Hippo). He thereafter extended the concept to danger in the translation of texts and that no one knows what anyone really means.
The context of this was that I had a graduate Rhetorical Theory class at Duquesne University long ago and our reading of St. Augustine was on the issue of Rhetorical Theory. So we read the parts that contained his discussion of rhetoric, language, and translations of texts.
Fanatical elements in the early Church wanted to discard all "pagan" arts, but St. Augustine argued against it, saying that any pagan art repurposed for Christianity was not offensive. Specifically, he sought to repurpose Rhetoric for the priesthood.