Semantic Satiation (opens in new tab)

Seems naturally very close to Shannon's theory of information; a symbol has meaning in proportion to how unexpected it is.

This makes sense, but it reminds me a lot of how we filter out sensations after so long (i.e., we can't smell a bad odor after a certain amount of time, or we stop noticing a certain annoying sound after so long).

I cannot remember or find the term for this but iirc it's Psych 101.

I found these though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_auditory_attention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimulus_filtering

Exactly. Say you are standing on the side of an empty road. You'll certainly notice the first car that passes, maybe the second and the third. As the traffic intensifies, you'll eventually stop noticing the individual cars and assume they are part of the background.

I would add that it’s almost all stimuli. One could only wish that pain worked this way (unfortunately, no matter how many body parts hurt, it doesn’t mean only the one that hurts the worst is the only one that appears to hurt).

In college (undergrad and grad school) I did a lot of graphics programming and color lost all meaning on many occasions. It wasn't the whole variable name (well, typically, maybe on occasion but not normally) but often things like BackgroundColor or ForegroundColor and so on. On many busy coding days at some point I'd just see this word scattered about the screen and have to convince myself that it was in fact the correct word and used correctly and spelled correctly (though perhaps British English speakers would disagree on the spelling).

I haven't experienced it in quite a while, though. And I don't do any graphics programming anymore anyways so when that word shows up in my code it's usually in the very minimal bit of GUI programming I touch anymore. I'm not sure any other word ever gave me quite as much trouble.

At $WORK the word "leverage" is used as a verb so frequently, usually with no meaning other than "use", that it begins to sound like noise. A sort of grunt that must be periodically uttered, from time to time, to indicate the speaker is a member of the glorious tribe of passionate, devoted $WORK employees, like a radio callsign periodically interrupting a transmission to assure the listener of the station's identity. What scraps of meaning it still clung to -- even as a buzzword -- began to fade.

I have resolved to assiduously use "use" when I mean "use".

Oh my god yes. I had a Jasper Report I was working on once that had totals, subtotals, totals of those subtotals...

Suddenly I just froze wondering "wtf is a total?!"

Roads. Ro-ads. Row-ads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT3vOCWA-J0

The word "lunch" does it for me within five repetitions or so.

I don't have this problem with variables or method names, but the type "double" does this to me.

Thunk in Redux. Thunk, thunk, thunk. It's just an onomatopoeia for me at this point.

Hi jcims

Sorry I am trying to contact you in a non traditional way but I need your advice on something very important. My mom (53Y) got diagnosed with stage 3c ovarian cancer recently. The surgery has been done and chemo started 3 days back.

I saw your comment on the HN post which is around 3 years old where you mentioned your wife took part in clinic trial for atezolizumab.

Fingers crossed. I hope you guys are doing ok. I need to learn more about the treatment. I would be grateful to you for any advice/help you can give me. I don’t know your email id. My email id is anuragvermaknn@gmail.com.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16279856

Verbally is how I experience it exclusively as in not like saying it aloud but more like uttering it to myself internally if that makes sense. I should log this when it happens next time. Usually I happen to be mentally reciting/picturing* a word syllabically and not alphabetically and for a span of 3-4 seconds it feels utterly alien. Happens with the simplest words like colour, market etc.

You mean "orally"? "Verbally" means "by means of words".

I don’t remember experiencing semantic satiation while reading, and it’s been awhile otherwise. Used to happen as a young person what feels like often but may only be a handful of times.

oh sure, fine, thanks hackernews formatting for turning my rad ASCII art "NO" into just a string of Yes

Just thought the same thing. Funny that they spent probably an entire minute worth of skit on it.

Ha, that's interesting. But have you come across the AI-linked crypto, ML Blockchain? It's completely distributed and secure blockchain through crypto. The ML is blockchain which blockchain crypto blockchain, blockchain sec blockchain distributed blockchain blockchain AI blockchain blockchain. Blockchain blockchain blockchain, blockchain bLoCkChAiN BlOcKcHaIn bLoCkChAiN BlOcKcHaIn bLoCkChAiN BlOcKcHaIn bCkOlcAnIh

Enough people have expressed difficulty googling for it so I thought I'd share my google search to find it:

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=word+do...

Sometimes the simplest search is the most effective!

And you're welcome. (I was taking a complicated job application test where you had to recognize the color of a word and click the word that spelled the color. Everything was red or blue. As you can imagine...)