Sunday 16 September 2018
Saturday 15 September 2018
Semantic Satiation
Leon Jakobovits James coined the phrase "semantic satiation" in his 1962 doctoral dissertation at McGill University. Prior to that, the expression "verbal satiation" had been used along with terms that express the idea of mental fatigue. The dissertation listed many of the names others had used for the phenomenon:
The dissertation presents several experiments that demonstrate the operation of the semantic satiation effect in various cognitive tasks such as rating words and figures that are presented repeatedly in a short time, verbally repeating words then grouping them into concepts, adding numbers after repeating them out loud, and bilingual translations of words repeated in one of the two languages. In each case subjects would repeat a word or number for several seconds, then perform the cognitive task using that word. It was demonstrated that repeating a word prior to its use in a task made the task somewhat more difficult.
The explanation for the phenomenon is that, in the cortex, verbal repetition repeatedly arouses a specific neural pattern that corresponds to the meaning of the word. Rapid repetition makes both the peripheral sensorimotor activity and central neural activation fire repeatedly. This is known to cause reactive inhibition, hence a reduction in the intensity of the activity with each repetition. Jakobovits James (1962) calls this conclusion the beginning of "experimental neurosemantics".
- In Edgar Allan Poe's 1835 short story Berenice, the protagonist describes a mental state that induced him "to repeat, monotonously, some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind".
- In James Thurber's 1933 short story "More Alarms At Night", Thurber describes the phenomenon as follows: "I began to indulge in the wildest fancies as I lay there in the dark, such as that there was no such town, and even that there was no such state as New Jersey. I fell to repeating the word 'Jersey' over and over again, until it became idiotic and meaningless. If you have ever lain awake at night and repeated one word over and over, thousands and millions and hundreds of thousands of millions of times, you know the disturbing mental state you can get into."
- In the Friends episode "The One with the Stoned Guy", the character referenced in the title repeats the word "tartlets" until he notes that it has "lost all meaning".
- Semantic satiation is used extensively in Tony Burgess's novel Pontypool Changes Everything, as well as in the film adaptation of the novel.
- In William Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying, the character of Addie Bundren speaks of the phenomenon as repeating a word until the meaning drains from it, leaving it an empty container.
- In Kathryn Lasky's book Guardians of Ga'Hoole, one of the brainwashing techniques the antagonists use against young owls is making them repeat their own name until it loses all meaning to them.
- In The Simpsons episode "Radioactive Man", Milhouse Van Houten tells Bart Simpson that "making movies is so horribly repetitive; I've said 'jiminy jillikers!' so many times the words have lost all meaning!
- In King of the Hill episode "Vision Quest," Dale Gribble experiences the psychological phenomenon when he says, "There's wood. We're passing all kinds of wood. Wood, wood, wood, wood, wood, wood. That's a weird word. Wood, wood. Weird word. Weird wood.
Breaching
In the fields of sociology and social psychology, a breaching experiment is an experiment that seeks to examine people's reactions to violations of commonly accepted social rules or norms. Breaching experiments are most commonly associated with ethnomethodology, and in particular the work of Harold Garfinkel. Breaching experiments involve the conscious exhibition of "unexpected" behavior/violation of social norms, an observation of the types of social reactions such behavioral violations engender, and an analysis of the social structure that makes these social reactions possible.The idea of studying the violation of social norms and the accompanying reactions has bridged across social science disciplines, and is today used in both sociology and psychology.
The assumption behind this approach is not only that individuals engage daily in building up "rules" for social interaction, but also that people are unaware they are doing so.The work of sociologist Erving Goffman laid the theoretical foundation for ways to study the construction of everyday social meanings and behavioral norms, especially by breaking unstated but universally accepted rules. Garfinkel expanded on this idea by developing ethnomethodology as a qualitative research method for social scientists. Later, in the 1970s and 80s, famous social psychologist Stanley Milgram developed two experiments to observe and quantify responses to breaches in social norms to empirically analyze reactions to violation of those norms
Thursday 13 September 2018
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