What Is Actually Semantic Saturation?

What is actually what we call Semantic Saturation? Read both Theories. What happens in your brain when you repeat a word over and over? Do you think the word is losing its meaning? So what is your opinion? When you evaluate the working principles of the brain, is there a thing as Semantic Saturation?

THEORY 1: There Is Semantic Saturation

“Because I was lying in the dark, I began indulging in the wildest fantasies… I repeatedly said the word ‘Jersey’ until it became silly and meaningless. If you’ve ever repeated a word over and over, thousands and millions and hundreds of millions of times at night, you know the disturbing mental state you can get into. “

James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times, 1933

Have you ever had enough of the meaning of words? Take your eyes off your phone and start saying ‘sour’ repeatedly, or take a pen and paper and write the word repeatedly. After a while, your mind will begin to perceive the meaning of the word sour as an abstract sound. This phenomenon (i.e., a word loses all meaning when repeated multiple times) is quite common and has a fancy name, ‘Semantic saturation.’

Scientific circles believe that this experience, which resembles a cognitive processing error, gives us an important idea of ​​how our mind perceives the outside world. Psychologists have been aware of this peculiar effect since 1907 when it was first described. However, it wasn’t until the 1960s that someone decided to take it seriously. It was introduced in 1962. James even wrote a thesis on this phenomenon.

So How Does Semantic Saturation Occur?

When you hear, read or speak a word, your brain turns sounds into ideas. This idea is combined with other words to form a more complex idea. However, when you repeat a word multiple times, your brain stops perceiving it as a word, meaning it cannot translate it into an idea and breaks it down into sounds. These sounds, of course, have nothing to do with the natural meaning of the word. That’s why a perfectly normal word suddenly starts to sound meaningless. In other words, sensory signals trigger the firing of regions in the brain associated with the concepts and categories that give meaning to these signals. The sound of a word is just such a signal, and once that signal is fired, more energy is required to fire those brain cells a second time. Therefore, the second time we hear a word, our brain expends more energy to associate it with the concepts associated with the word constantly. The third time requires even more energy. For the fourth time, maybe those cells won’t even fire.

Leon Jakobovits James called this process’ reactive inhibition’ in his thesis. The more you are exposed to a set of stimuli, the more resistant you will be to those stimuli. This phenomenon was also exemplified in a now-famous study. When researchers yelled loudly at a sleeping cat, the cat stood up and immediately woke up. The researchers continued to make the same sound over and over when the cat fell asleep, and each time the cat’s response got a little lighter; Finally, he stopped responding. The important point here is that the voice is always the same tone. When the tone changed, the cat began to react as if hearing the sound for the first time.

In some experiments, it has been revealed that not only is the verbal repetition of the word necessary for forming semantic saturation, but only seeing and hearing that word often causes the same result.

No word is immune to semantic saturation for humans, but some words may take longer to lose meaning depending on the emotional strength of our experiences with those words. For example, you may have a stronger image attached to a word like “home.” Due to your previous experience with home and the associated connotations of the word, your mind wanders between the meaningful categories associated with the word “home”, making it difficult to reach a breaking point in person. Whereas maybe the word “horse” is less meaningful to you, you can reach saturation faster when you repeat it. That is unless you’ve had a traumatic event involving horses.

The effects of semantic saturation have also been studied in treating phobias and speech anxiety. For example, this phenomenon is now used to develop techniques to reduce the speech anxiety of stutterers. In addition, since the repetition of certain words leads to semantic saturation, it can also reduce the intensity of negative memories and emotions triggered during speech.

Another aspect of both good and bad semantic saturation is that it reveals that our cognitive processing capacity is reduced to what we have experienced before. From a neurological perspective, we can save valuable resources interpreting information from our senses that have already been processed. ‘Neural Habit’ helps our brain reduce the amount of interference from what we’ve seen before, which improves our perception of new information. In a world where we are constantly bombarded with sensory input, semantic saturation is a technique our mind develops to protect itself. Thus, if we can be aware of the process, we can filter out what is unimportant.

The downside is that if we overlook the concepts, we experience semantic saturation, and we can forget our enlightening experiences throughout human history. For example, suppose someone decides to call all dogs “cats.”

The first person to do so will be considered odd and probably not understood. If most people start doing this, it may become the new norm, and many people may believe that dogs and cats are the same. But in reality, repeated word use will not turn dogs into cats. This will make us less sensitive to the essence of a dog (or a cat) and less able to distinguish between the two. The same kind of phenomenon has happened to the concept of democracy. Most children born worldwide are said to live in a democracy because people have the right to vote in many countries every few years. However, the acts of choosing and voting are different. Or, teaching a newborn baby a dirty blanket by repeating it as ‘clean’ does not remove the residues, dust, and stains on the blanket. It just causes the baby not to learn to clean up the pollution.

THEORY 2: No Semantic Saturation

Is there a supra-brain structure that provides integration in the brain?

As defined in modern neurosciences, the brain is like a hospital where specialization has been brought to the point of almost absurdity. For example, in the language-related part of the brain, some neurons (nerve cells) work only to grasp proper nouns, and some neurons only to grasp irregular verbs. In the vision section, some nerve cells work towards orange-red colors, some for diagonal lines with strong contrast, and some for fast movements from left to right. The question that needs to be asked now is how these highly specialized functions of different brain parts are reassembled to form the mind, which is the composite of thought and perception.

This puzzle, also known as the binding problem, has become more difficult as experiments reveal more specialized brain parts. Some theorists have proposed that different elements of perception come together in so-called “convergent zones.” The most obvious candidates of these regions are the “short-term” or “working” memory areas, which can immediately address many subjects. In two experiments conducted in 1993, it was observed that there were highly specialized regions in “working memory,” in which monkeys were monitored with electrodes and humans scanned with PET (positron emission tomography) in the other subjects.

Fraser A.W. of Yale University School of Medicine. In experiments by Wilson, Séamas P.Ó Scalaidhe, and Patricia S. Goldman-Rakic, staff train monkeys to accomplish two tasks requiring “working memory.” One of these jobs is for the monkeys to fix their eyes on a fixed point in the middle of a screen. Meanwhile, a flashing square in another part of the screen is in the monkey’s field of view. Then, a few seconds after the square disappeared, the monkey directed its gaze to the spot where the square was found.

The other job requires keeping in mind information about the quality of the image rather than its location. First, researchers create a flashing image in the center of the screen. Then, each monkey is trained to wait until the image disappears and to turn its eyes to the right or left, depending on the observed shape. With the electrodes, the pre-frontal cortex nerve cells of the monkey brain are seen on the screen. The activities of the neurons in the pre-frontal cortex are projected onto the screen with electrodes.

Complementary findings by researchers at the University of Washington over the past year come from studies with PET in humans. In the experiment, volunteers are given a list of nouns and are asked to read them aloud and say a predicate associated with each noun. So, for example, when the word “dog” is read, a predicate such as “bark” should be said.

This experiment showed increased neuron activity in many different areas of the brain, including the pre-frontal and cingulate cortex. But the repetitive repetition of the list containing the same names causes neuron activity to shift to different regions. When volunteers are given a new list of names, neuron activity appears to increase and return to the original areas.

This experiment shows that one part of the brain acts as short-term memory, which requires word generation, but another part takes over after the task becomes automatic. In other words, memory is partitioned not only according to its content but also according to its function. Steven E. Petersen of the University of Washington says these results agree with Goldman Rakic’s thinking.

So how do these specialized areas of the brain work in harmony with each other? Are the activities coordinated from a single center or by an integration network spread across the brain? Petersen argues that there is one localized area, or several localized areas, in which perception, memory, and volition are integrated.

Goldman Rakic’s views, on the other hand, are closer to a non-hierarchical model in which different but equivalent regions are interconnected and interrelated. Larry R. Squire, a memory researcher at the University of California, San Diego, thinks that solving the “connection problem” may take many years, with no real clue about the connection mechanism. But on the other hand, as Squire said, he is hopeful that these problems will be answered soon. New models can be created with practical information, thanks to microelectrodes, one of the latest products of rapidly developing technology. These imaging techniques do not harm the body (such as PET and Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and computers. : “Without this technological support, nothing can be done anymore.”

John Horgan

Brainusermanual team’s view: In our view, Theory 2 is correct. That is, “semantic saturation” is not the disappearance of meaning, as mentioned. It’s just another part of the brain taking over the job. This is not the loss of meaning but rather the emergence of other meanings. In other words, the main reason for this strange feeling that the repeated word creates in you is related to the operation of different neuron groups in the brain. With the repetition of some words hundreds of times, the meaning of the word may be lost after a while, but remember that the words used contain various meanings and frequencies according to their semantics. Did you know that various rituals are performed in various ancient knowledge, especially about certain words and their repetition of these words? Many scientists and famous people you see on television and even see every day continue to do this for years because they get results from these rituals.