Tired Words

Peanut butter.
Peanut butter.
Peanut butter.

Try saying this over and over again in your mind (or aloud). Does the phrase start to lose any semblance of meaning?

This is called semantic satiation, or sometimes word fatigue.

A related phenomenon in psychology is called repetition blindness, where an extra word the can the sneak right past your defenses.

What’s going on here? Why do some perfectly sensible words start to sound like gibberish to our ears after enough repetition? Why do other words sneak through the like that?

Why does sense become nonsense?

To simplify things dramatically (don’t worry, we’ll get confusing again soon), your mind has a little dictionary of words it carries around with it. Whenever you see (or hear) one of these words in the dictionary, whatever connection exists between your brain and the spot where that word is stored is strengthened.

That’s not entirely accurate, but it’s a very useful way to think about it. Instead of being kept in a specific place, where a word is stored travels from one neuronal connection to another. This is a little bit like an internet connection between two neurons, with something like a dial-up connection when you first learn a word.

As you hear (or read) the word over and over again, this dial-up connection is upgraded to cable internet. Now, the connection is much stronger, and you can identify a word’s meaning in an instant. The neurons are firing at very high speeds.

Dial-up might seem painful in retrospect, but it was all we had back then. I created rituals centered around waiting for pages to load, where I’d go to another room to brew coffee, come back and click on something, and then go pour myself a cup, or go pee, or pretty much anything to kill a minute or two until the next page (or image) loaded.

The switch over to cable was shocking to me. You clicked on things, and then you saw whatever it was that you wanted to see, more or less immediately. Suddenly, animated GIFs and images were no challenge at all. Eventually, streaming video became almost watchable.

Now, you might think that an upgrade to fiber-optic cables (much, much faster speeds than cable) would be the bee’s knees. The world will be our oyster; we’ll be able to think so so so much faster, and we’ll be so much smarter as a result.

Unfortunately, our brains aren’t wired for this kind of speed. It’s a bit like a very old website that is designed to function on a dial-up network, configured in anticipation of all those little delays. It’s like your brain goes and makes a cup of coffee while it’s waiting for the page to download, and it just can’t imagine living any other way.

If an old webpage is plugged into a fiber-optic connection, all of the careful tricks to make the page load properly fall apart. The speed is so fast that everything seems to appear to us all at once, destroying any semblance of a cute message or presentation the original page wanted to convey.

When you’re exposed to a word enough times, you can start to form something like a fiber-optic connection in there. The only problem is that your hardware isn’t designed to keep up with this upgrade, so what ends up happening is like an overload for your poor neurons.

That’s what’s going on with peanut butter, peanut butter, peanut butter. There’s a cousin-effect to semantic satiation that I might or might not have gotten away with using on you. It’s repetition blindness, where I snuck a couple of the’s past some less astute readers.

This works because our brains are constantly adjusting and simplifying the picture of the world we see. They do this so that we’re not constantly overwhelmed with that fiber-optic connection everywhere. We don’t notice that second the because the little copy editor that lives inside our brains decides it’s not important enough to pay attention to.