Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Semantic Satiation

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

You know when you read a word over and over it starts to lose its meaning? There’s a term for that and why it happens is fascinating.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for Dave and this is short stuff. Short stuff. That's right. All about something that,

a big thanks to mentalfloss.co and how emotions are made. But the big thing that happens to a lot of people is when, and for me, it happens when I say a word out loud too many times. I've never had the experience of writing a word too many times. Oh, really? No, I guess, because I just don't sit around

and write the same word over and over. But it's the idea that if you say something or write something over and over, that word starts to sound weird or look weird. Then it starts to completely kind of fall apart the more you do it to the point where you're like, what even is driveway? Right, and it becomes just a string of sounds

or if you're just seeing it visually, a string of letters. Yeah, it's a phenomenon. It is, it's an actual thing. It's called semantic satiation. And it's actually a kind of a window into the way our brain works. I believe to conserve energy, but we'll dive a little more into it.

The thing is, semantic satiation is not new. We've been probably doing it ever since we've been speaking or writing words, right? So say Bronze Age. And it was first described, semantic satiation was first described in 1907 in the American Journal of Psychology. Should I read it?

I think you should, because I think it gets it across really well. All right, if a printed word is looked at steadily for some little time, it would be found to take on a curiously strange and foreign aspect. This loss of familiarity and its appearance sometimes makes it look like a word

in another language, sometimes proceeds further until the word is a mere collection of letters and occasionally reaches the extreme where the letters themselves look like meaningless marks on the paper. Right. So these psychologists who were describing it back

in 1907 are basically focused on seeing it written. Right. Again, that's how I've normally experienced it. And the best way to experience it is to just have one word, that one word typed out on paper, right? Because it's in isolation and it quickly falls apart. But they nailed something, I think, in their description.

It's a loss of familiarity. It just doesn't, it's not itself any longer. And it's completely subjective to you because the person sitting next to you might not be experiencing that. While you are, you're just lost in the sea of unfamiliarity and the word driveway just doesn't make sense anymore. Right.

And I guess what I was saying was writing or typing it over and over, you don't have to do that even. It can just be looking at it on paper over and over. Because I was thinking it might make sense in the first days of writing when they were using writing longhand to do like logging pounds of wheat or whatever.

Sure. Like writing the same word over and over might have done it, but that's not necessarily the case. No, but it can happen like that. Right. Yeah. So there was a guy named Leon James. He's the guy who coined the term semantic satiation.

There's other terms for it too, word decrement. It's gross. Extinction, reminiscence, a little too broad. Verbal transformation, that's a good one, but semantic satiation is the one that everybody said, that's the one. Yeah, and that happened in 1962. He's a professor or was at least a professor of psychology

at the University of Hawaii at their College of Social Sciences. And he did some interesting, I mean, he described it as a, he did some experiments we'll talk about in a minute, but he described it in a way that also kind of helps drive it home as a kind of fatigue. Right, yeah.

And basically like he explains how when a cell fires, it's gonna take more energy for it to fire the second and third time on down the line. And once you get down to like the fourth time that cell is firing, apparently it won't even respond unless you wait a few seconds. And so I guess is he likening that to the repetition of the word?

Yeah, he's saying if you just expose yourself to the word the first time, your brain's gonna go through the process of recalling all the memories and emotions and everything attached that you have attached to that word. Right. And then if you do that again, if you just think or look at the same order here,

the same word again, it's gonna do it again, but it's gonna be like, okay, I don't know why we're doing this again. Third time it's gonna sigh heavily while it's doing it. The fourth time it's just gonna stand there with its arms crossed and say, I'm not recalling any of this stuff. And again, it's probably because the brain,

likes to conserve energy as much as possible. And it's being presented with the same stimulus over and over again. And it's like, I've already done my job here. I don't need to keep doing it. This is a waste of energy, literally. And that process does not apply just to semantic satiation. Semantic satiation is a type of a larger phenomenon,

which is what I just described called reactive inhibition. And that's the same thing that's behind going nose blind to the smells in your house. That's a type of reactive inhibition too. Yeah, which was the most disturbing thing I've learned ever on the show. It is, because it's not great to come back to your house a week later and be like,

this is what my house really smells like. I know. It's sort of that we just tend to live with our head in the sand. I think that's how I'm gonna proceed on that one. Because if not, then what? You just know your house smells like rotten tangerines or something.

All right, well, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk a little bit more about this after this. Chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk, chalk. This case has all the markings of a ritualistic, occult murder.

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or wherever you listen to podcasts. What's up, y'all? This is Questlove. And, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends. Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Unpaid Bill. And we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists.

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Almanac-ing your musical history and learning things about hip-hop artists and things you never thought, then you're a lot like me. But you're also a fan of Questlove Supreme. One of the things I love the most about this show is that we get to learn from the masters. I look at being on this show as my graduate program in music. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the I Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Suprema! So are you with me? Are you? All right, here's a very fun thing that Leon James did. He did a lot of different research on how this can be applied, on not just words, but other things.

And I find this fascinating. And we'll jump back to the stuttering thing, the music charts, like the Billboard Top 100 or whatever, he studied this and he found a correlation where songs that really hit the top of the charts really, really fast also went off the charts really, really fast and songs that kind of worked their way up the top 100 or whatever to the top 10,

let's say, also faded away very slowly. It's fascinating. Yeah, it's basically semantic satiation is a type of burnout and you can burn out on hearing the same thing and your brain being triggered by it over and over again and the thing that's gonna storm the charts is gonna get the most airplay so everybody's

gonna get sick of it faster. It's gonna lose its effect more quickly. That's a pretty clever way of showing that by looking at the pop charts. But it's not just like the charts themselves that show that the songs, individual songs have that same effect, anybody who's listened to any song made by Journey now in 2023

knows that you can burn out on a song after hearing it too many times. It's sad but true, Journey's songs are so great but if I hear Don't Stop Believing one more time, I'm gonna drive my car into a traffic pole. Yeah, I had, especially with Classic Rock, I have a lot of instances of bands that I loved, loved, loved forever and then I was just like,

I can't hear any of it anymore. But then 15 years later, I'm back on it. Right, right. Well, that's another feature of Semantic Satiation. Like Leon James said, or the 1907 old-timey psychologist said, if you wait a little bit, it'll come back to you. It's a temporary thing where your brain is like, oh, okay, I'm being presented with this again

and it's new enough. But you can also get easily burned out on that same stuff even faster after it comes back that second time, right? Yeah, I think so. Then Classic Rock is a great example because that's the genre that refuses to go away. And it's one where you turn it on any Classic Rock station

and you're gonna hear that Journey song or that Boston song that you just may not be able to handle anymore that you used to love. Right, exactly. What's interesting about it though is so like the words themselves lose their meaning. They stop evoking the emotion or the thought of the association or the conceptual information

that you attach to those words. And the words become like musical notes. It's like the vocals become the same thing as an instrument, like a guitar or something like that. And if you stop and think about it, you know all the words to don't stop believing, but they rarely have that same, well, I shouldn't say rarely, it depends on the person,

but it can very easily not have any impact on you whatsoever. It's, I mean, it can still evoke emotion, but the words themselves aren't making you think of what Steve Perry is saying. And Steve Perry is actually a really good example of that because his vocals are so melodious that it's very easy for them to transition

into music rather than words, you know? Yeah, I mean, you can be a small town girl living in a lonely world and still feel nothing when that song comes up if you've heard it too many times. Nothing, except rage. I think it's interesting that words, a word can spark an emotion or be tied to an emotion, period.

Just like seeing a word on a piece of paper, and they've used examples, I believe, like, you know, even seeing the word anger can like kind of prime the pump for you to be angry. It doesn't necessarily make you angry, but it can spark an emotion in you that sort of gets you headed in that direction, right? Right, yeah, like you can be primed to feel anger,

whereas if you see that word anger written down or something like that, and something comes along that would make you angry, you're more likely to become angry at that thing if you've seen that word. So, yeah, that whole semantic satiation thing reveals that fact, that words have that effect. They have emotional attachments. They can evoke emotions in us.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. I did mention stuttering at the beginning, and we'll probably just close with this a little bit. Leon James did. He was like, well, I wonder if I could apply this to people who stutter, and let me do this experiment where I call people who have a stutter over and over again all day long, and talk to them,

and see how much I can annoy them. But what he found was the more he called, the less they stuttered. So, the stress of receiving that phone call apparently seems like it had been satiated as well. And yeah, that's not probably the same thing as semantic satiation. I agree.

I think this is Leon James showing off. I think so too. But what it basically shows is it's the same thing as exposure, like if you fly in an airplane a bunch and you're afraid to fly, you're going to become less afraid to fly over time. One way to explain it is that you're showing yourself there's actually nothing to be afraid of.

Another one is that you're actually stimulating that stress or that anxiety enough times that your brains just like forget about it. I'm done, I'm satiated. Yeah, very interesting. It is interesting. The brain is interesting, Chuck. It certainly is.

Well, Chuck agreed with me, everybody, so I'm going to end on a high note and say short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts to my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.