Let’s think about the word ‘repeated’ for a little while. If I repeated ‘repeated’ enough times, then the repeated instances of ‘repeated’ would cause you to experience a feeling called semantic satiation – you would have seen the word ‘repeated’ repeated so many times that it lost all meaning.

My first memory of this experience is from my teenage years, when I lived in the arse end of nowhere. I was sat waiting for one of the all-too-rare buses that would take me to the glamorous post-war concrete and gin distilleries of Plymouth. The bus was late, and all the entertainment I had was reading a road sign that pointed to Callington, home of Ginster’s pasties. After a while, ‘Callington’ stopped looking like a place name and sort of… disintegrated into a weird noise. It was most disconcerting.

Little did I know that the explanation for my experience already existed. Around thirty years beforehand, a psychologist called Leon Jakobovits [i] was the first to come up with the idea of semantic satiation, and research on it has been going ever since.

Repeating things a few times is helpful!

Ever had a fact you needed to remember that you kept repeating to yourself until it sunk in? Or maybe had that visited upon you, say while learning multiplication tables in school? This relies on a technique that psychologists call repetition priming. Each time you repeat something, you make yourself more likely to remember it… up to a point.

Repeating things a lot of times is not helpful

If five repetitions of a fact help you remember it for, say, half a day, then surely fifty repetitions should help you remember it for ten times as long? Well, maybe – and if you want to know more about how to use repeated encounters with the same ideas as a learning tool then I recommend this very useful how-to blog post by a psychologist who specialises in helping people learn.

The thing is, if you want to repeat something fifty times in a very short time then at some point it’s going to lose all meaning for you because you have crossed the barrier into semantic satiation [ii] (though some people will cross it much sooner than others [iii]). Semantic satiation isn’t just annoying, it can also slow you down. For example, if you see someone’s name enough times that it becomes satiated, then you’ll struggle to remember what their name is when you see their face [iv].

A warning to anyone out there spending lot of time doodling the names of your crushes: be aware that semantic satiation means you might struggle to talk to them afterwards without calling them Dimples or Smerp or something else that’s not their name.

What’s happening to the brain when a word goes weird?

All explanations of semantic satiation revolve around a built-in feature of the brain: it needs rest. Imagine you’re doing the same job as a brain cell, which is essentially receiving a message and passing it on. The brain cell does it by changing what kinds of chemicals it has inside it, while you might receive a message by hearing or reading it, and pass it on by repeating it or forwarding an email. Despite this difference, the upshot for you and the brain cell is the same: both you and the brain cell get tired and need a rest after a while. The messages might still arrive, but they no longer get passed on.

Time for a nap now.

There are four ideas about where the message might have got ‘stuck’ in semantic satiation.

Lexical satiation [v] : the part of the brain that deals with perceiving the word becomes inactive.
Meaning satiation [vi] : the part of the brain that deals with understanding what the word means becomes inactive.
Associative satiation [vii] : the part of the brain that links perceiving and meaning becomes inactive.
Attentional satiation [viii] : the part of the brain that helps us pay attention to what is happening either becomes inactive or forces us to shift our attention elsewhere.

How do we tell which, if any, of these is correct? Well, let’s have a look at some of the research.

Pilotti and colleagues [v] reasoned that if lexical satiation is what’s going on, then hearing the same word spoken again and again by the same speaker should cause it to lose all meaning, but the same word spoken by different speakers shouldn’t, and that’s true. However, after I’d read about this, I immediately thought that while the overall meaning of the word doesn’t change with different speakers, the context does. Hello from a friend is very different from hello from an interviewer, which in turn is very different from hello from a person who you’ve just pranked. As I didn’t fancy going round recording lots of people saying ‘hello’, here is a graphical representation of this idea with ‘hello’ written lots of different fonts and contexts.

🎵 Hello, is it me(aning) you’re looking for? 🎵

Then there’s the evidence that the meaning idea is right – if you’re thinking about whether one word rhymes with lots of other words, then semantic satiation won’t happen, but if you’re thinking about whether one word means the same as others, then it will happen [vi].

We can also have a look at the brain, though while we’re doing so please remember that while a lot of researchers think that the brain and the mind are the same thing, that may not actually be the case for reasons I will get into in a later blog. If the lexical idea is correct, then we should see less activity in the parts of the brain that deal with looking at or hearing words. If the meaning idea is correct, then it will be the part that deals with meaning that will be less active. Associative satiation should mean that there’s less activity in the parts of the brain that link these two areas, and attentional satiation… well, a lot of different bits of the brain seem to be involved with attention, so it might be hard to say. As it happens, the brain imaging evidence points to the associative account [ix].

All of what I have just told you is research done with languages that use an alphabetic writing system, like English, Hangul and Armenian. We should also have a look at some non-alphabetic writing systems – like Chinese, which uses a logographic system (that is, every character represents a word or a phrase, rather than representing a noise as it at least approximately does in alphabetic systems). Mostly we should do this because it’s important not to assume that everyone in the world behaves and thinks in exactly the same way, but also because logographic and alphabetic writing systems are quite different and we might get some more insight if we look at both of them.

First off, yes, semantic satiation can still happen with logographic characters, with the links between the different components of a single character feeling like they’re coming undone [x]. Some of the evidence from studies with the Chinese writing system points to meaning satiation, since it’s possible for semantic satiation to happen even if you’re just thinking about a concept without ever seeing the word for that concept [x]. However, some other research shows that seeing a character without thinking about its meaning or thinking about meaning without repeating the character does not cause semantic satiation – which again suggests that the associative idea is right [xi].

How to undo semantic satiation

Congratulations, you have made it to the last part of the blog and soon you will stop seeing the word ‘satiation’, so if you’ve developed semantic satiation for it then all you need do is wait for a bit, because it’s not a very common word so you’re unlikely to keep on encountering it after you finish reading.

If you’re in a situation where you can’t just wait for it to go away, then instead you’ll need to let your mind wander for a few seconds [xii]. Here are some happy prompts to help you with that: