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Short Stuff: Semantic Satiation · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: there's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for Dave. And this
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: is short stuff, short stuff that's right, all about something
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  Speaker 1: that big thanks to mental floss dot co and how
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  Speaker 1: emotions are made. But the big thing that happens to
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  Speaker 1: a lot of people is when and for me, it
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  Speaker 1: happens when I say a word out loud too many times.
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  Speaker 1: I've never had the experience of writing a word too
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  Speaker 1: many times. Oh really, no, I guess because I just
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  Speaker 1: don't sit around and write the same word over and over.
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  Speaker 1: But it's it's the idea that if you say something
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  Speaker 1: or write something over and over, that word starts to
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  Speaker 1: sound weird or look weird. Then it starts to completely
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  Speaker 1: kind of fall apart. The more you do it to
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  Speaker 1: the point where you're like, what even is driveway right?
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  Speaker 1: And it becomes just a string of sounds or if
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  Speaker 1: you're just seeing it visually, a string of letters. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: it's a phenomenon. It is. It's an actual thing. It's
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  Speaker 1: called semantic satiation, and it's actually a kind of a
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  Speaker 1: window into the way our brain works. I believe to
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  Speaker 1: conserve energy. But we'll dive a little more into it.
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  Speaker 1: The thing is, semantic satiation is not new. We've been
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  Speaker 1: probably doing it ever since we've been speaking or writing words, right,
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  Speaker 1: so saying bronze age, and it was first described. Semantic
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  Speaker 1: satiation was first described in nineteen oh seven in the
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  Speaker 1: American Journal of Psychology. Should I read it? I think
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  Speaker 1: you should, because I think it gets it across really well.
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  Speaker 1: All right, If a printed word has looked at steadily
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  Speaker 1: for some little time, will be found to take on
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  Speaker 1: a curiously strange and foreign aspect. This loss of familiarity
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  Speaker 1: in its appearance sometimes makes it look like a word
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  Speaker 1: in another language. Sometimes proceeds further until the word is
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  Speaker 1: a mere collection of letters, and occasionally reaches the extreme
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  Speaker 1: where the letters to themselves look like meaningless marks on
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  Speaker 1: the paper. Right. So these psychologists who are describing it
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  Speaker 1: back in nineteen and seven are basically focused on seeing
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  Speaker 1: it written right again. That's how I've normally experienced it,
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  Speaker 1: and the best way to experience it is to just
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  Speaker 1: have one word, that one word typed out on paper, right,
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  Speaker 1: because it's in isolation, and it quickly falls apart. But
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  Speaker 1: they nailed something, I think in their description. It's a
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  Speaker 1: loss of familiarity. It just doesn't it's not itself any longer.
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  Speaker 1: And it's completely subjective to you because the person sitting
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  Speaker 1: next to you might not be experiencing that while you are.
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  Speaker 1: You're just lost in the sea of unfamiliarity. And the
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  Speaker 1: word driveway just doesn't make sense anymore, right, And I
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  Speaker 1: guess what I was saying was writing or typing it
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  Speaker 1: over and over. You don't have to do that, even
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  Speaker 1: that can just be looking at it yes on paper
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  Speaker 1: over and over, because I was thinking it might make
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  Speaker 1: sense in the first days of writing, when they were
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  Speaker 1: using writing long hand to do like logging pounds of
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  Speaker 1: wheat or whatever, like writing the same word over and
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  Speaker 1: over might have done it. But that's not necessarily the case. No,
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  Speaker 1: But it can happen like that, right. Yeah. So there's
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  Speaker 1: a guy named Leon James. He's the guy who coined
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  Speaker 1: the term semantic satiation. There's other terms for it, to
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  Speaker 1: word decrement, it's gross extinction, reminiscence, a little too broad,
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  Speaker 1: verbal transformation, that's a good one, but semantic satiation is
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  Speaker 1: the one that everybody said, that's that's the one. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: And that happened in nineteen sixty two. He's a professor
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  Speaker 1: or was at least a professor of psychology at the
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  Speaker 1: University of Hawaii at their College of Social Sciences, and
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  Speaker 1: he did some interesting I mean, he described it as
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  Speaker 1: a he did some experiments we'll talk about in a minute,
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  Speaker 1: but he described it in a way that also kind
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  Speaker 1: of helps drive it home as a kind of fatigue, right. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: And basically, like he explains how when a sell fires,
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  Speaker 1: it's going to take more energy for it to fire
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  Speaker 1: the second and third time on down the line, and
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  Speaker 1: once you get down to like the fourth time that
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  Speaker 1: cell is firing, apparently it won't even respond unless you
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  Speaker 1: wait a few seconds. And so I guess is he
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  Speaker 1: likening that to the repetition of the word. Yeah, he's saying,
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  Speaker 1: if you if you just expose yourself to the word
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  Speaker 1: the first time, your brain's going to go through the
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  Speaker 1: process of recalling all the memories and emotions and everything
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  Speaker 1: attached that you have attached to that word. Right, And
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  Speaker 1: then if you do that again, if you just think
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  Speaker 1: or look at the same order here, the same word again,
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  Speaker 1: it's gonna do it again. But it's gonna be like, Okay,
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  Speaker 1: I don't know why we're doing this again. Third time,
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  Speaker 1: it's gonna sigh heavily while it's doing it. The fourth
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  Speaker 1: time it's just going to stand there with its arms
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  Speaker 1: crossed and say, I'm not recalling any of this stuff.
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  Speaker 1: And again, it's probably because the brain likes to conserve
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  Speaker 1: energy as much as possible, and it's being presented with
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  Speaker 1: the same stimulus over and over again, and it's like,
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  Speaker 1: I've already, I've already done my job here. I don't
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  Speaker 1: need to keep doing it. This is a waste of energy, literally,
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  Speaker 1: And that processes is not applied just to semantic satiation.
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  Speaker 1: Semantic satiation is a type of a larger phenomenon, which
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  Speaker 1: is what I just described called reactive inhibition. And that's
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  Speaker 1: the same thing that's behind going nose blind to the
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  Speaker 1: smells in your house. That's a type of reactive inhibition too. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: which was the most disturbing thing I've learned ever on
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  Speaker 1: the show. It is because it's not great to come
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  Speaker 1: back to your house a week later and be like,
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  Speaker 1: this is what my house really smells like. I know,
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  Speaker 1: it's sort of that we just tend to live with
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  Speaker 1: our head in the sand. I think that's how I'm
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  Speaker 1: going to proceed on that one, because if not, then
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  Speaker 1: what you just know your house smells like rotten dangerines
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  Speaker 1: or something. All right, well, let's take a break and
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  Speaker 1: we'll come back and talk a little bit more about
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  Speaker 1: this after this. That's why we should know. But Josh Clark,
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  Speaker 1: all right, here's a very fun thing that Leon James did.
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  Speaker 1: He did a lot of different research on how this
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  Speaker 1: can be applied on not just words but other things.
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  Speaker 1: And I find this fascinating. And we'll jump back to
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  Speaker 1: the stuttering thing. But the music charts, like the you know,
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  Speaker 1: Billboard Top one hundred or whatever. Yeah, he studied this
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  Speaker 1: and he found a correlation where songs that that really
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  Speaker 1: hit the top of the charts really really fast also
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  Speaker 1: went off the charts really really fast, and songs that
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  Speaker 1: kind of work their way up the top one hundred
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  Speaker 1: or whatever to the top ten, let's say, also faded
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  Speaker 1: away very slowly. Fascinating. Yeah, it's basically semantic satiation is
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  Speaker 1: a type of burnout, And you can burn out on
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  Speaker 1: hearing the same thing in your brain being triggered by
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  Speaker 1: it over and over again, and the thing that's going
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  Speaker 1: to storm the charts is going to get the most airplaced.
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  Speaker 1: Everybody's gonna get sick of it faster, it's gonna lose
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  Speaker 1: its effect more quickly. That's a pretty clever way of
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  Speaker 1: showing that by looking at the pop charts. Yeah, but
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  Speaker 1: it's not just like the charts themselves that show it.
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  Speaker 1: The songs, individual songs have that same effect. Anybody who's
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  Speaker 1: listened to any song made by Journey now in twenty
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  Speaker 1: twenty three knows that you can burn out on a
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  Speaker 1: song after hearing it too many times. Yeah, it's sad,
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  Speaker 1: but true. Journeys songs are so great. But if I
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  Speaker 1: hear don't stop believing one more time, I'm gonna drive
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  Speaker 1: my car into a traffic poll. Yeah, I had, especially
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  Speaker 1: with classic rock, I have a lot of instances of
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  Speaker 1: bands that I loved, loved, loved forever and then I
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  Speaker 1: was just like, I can't hear it any of it anymore, right,
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  Speaker 1: But then fifteen years later I'm back on it right right. Well,
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  Speaker 1: that's another feature of semantic satiation. Like Leon James said,
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  Speaker 1: if you're or the nineteen oh seven old timey psychologists said,
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  Speaker 1: if you wait a little bit, it'll come back to you.
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  Speaker 1: It's a temporary thing where your brain is like, oh okay,
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  Speaker 1: I'm being presented with us again and it's new enough,
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  Speaker 1: but you can also get easily burned out on that
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  Speaker 1: same stuff even faster after it comes back that second time, Right, Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: I think so. And classic rock is a great example
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  Speaker 1: because that's the genre that refuses to go away, right,
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  Speaker 1: And you know, it's one where you turn it on
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  Speaker 1: any classic rock station and you're gonna hear that Journey
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  Speaker 1: song or that Boston song that you just may not
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  Speaker 1: be able to handle anymore that you used to love,
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  Speaker 1: right exactly. What's interesting about it, though, is so like
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  Speaker 1: the words themselves lose their meaning. They stop evoking the
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  Speaker 1: emotion or the thought or the association or the conceptual
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  Speaker 1: information that you attached to those words, and the words
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  Speaker 1: become like musical notes. It's like the vocals become the
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  Speaker 1: same thing as an instrument, like a guitar or something
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  Speaker 1: like that. And if you stop and think about it,
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  Speaker 1: like you know, all the words to don't Stop Believing,
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  Speaker 1: but they rarely have that same well, I shouldn't say rarely.
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  Speaker 1: It depends on the person, but it can very easily
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  Speaker 1: not have any impact on you whatsoever. It's I mean,
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  Speaker 1: it can still evoke emotion, but the words themselves aren't
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  Speaker 1: making you think of what Steve Perry's saying. And Steve
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  Speaker 1: Perry's actually a really good example of that because his
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  Speaker 1: vocals are so melodious that it's very easy for them
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  Speaker 1: to transition into music rather than words. You know, Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: I mean, you can be a small town girl living
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  Speaker 1: in a lonely world and still feel nothing when that
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  Speaker 1: song comes up, if you've heard it too many times,
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  Speaker 1: nothing except rage. I think it's interesting that words a
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  Speaker 1: word can spark an emotion or be tied to an
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  Speaker 1: emotion period, just like seeing a word on a piece
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  Speaker 1: of paper. And they've used an example, I believe, like
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  Speaker 1: you know, even seeing the word anger can like kind
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  Speaker 1: of prime the pump for you to be angry. It
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  Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily make you angry, but it can spark an
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  Speaker 1: emotion in you to that sort of gets you headed
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  Speaker 1: in that direction, right right, Yeah, Like you can be
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  Speaker 1: primed to feel anger. Whereas if you're if you see
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  Speaker 1: that word anger written down or something like that, and
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  Speaker 1: something comes along that would make you angry, you're more
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  Speaker 1: likely to become angry at that thing if you've seen
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  Speaker 1: that word. So yeah, that whole semantic satiation thing reveals
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  Speaker 1: that that fact that words have that effect, they have
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  Speaker 1: emotional attachments, they can evoke emotions in us. Yeah, it's
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  Speaker 1: pretty cool. I did mention stuttering at the beginning, and
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  Speaker 1: we'll probably just close with this a little bit. Leon
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  Speaker 1: James did. He's like, well, I wonder if I could
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  Speaker 1: apply this to people who stutter, and let me do
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  Speaker 1: this experiment while where I call people who have a
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  Speaker 1: stutter over and over again all day long and talk
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  Speaker 1: to them and see how much I can annoy them.
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  Speaker 1: But what he found was the more he called, the
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  Speaker 1: less they stuttered. So the stress of receiving that phone
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  Speaker 1: call apparently seems like it had been satiated as well.
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  Speaker 1: And yeah, that's not This probably the same thing as
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  Speaker 1: semantic satiation. I think Chris is Leon James showing off.
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  Speaker 1: I think so too. But what it basically shows is
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  Speaker 1: it's the same thing as exposure. Like if you fly
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  Speaker 1: in an airplane a bunch and you're afraid to fly,
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  Speaker 1: you're going to become less afraid to fly over time.
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  Speaker 1: One way to explain it is that you're showing yourself
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  Speaker 1: there's actually nothing to be afraid of. Another one is
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  Speaker 1: that you're actually stimulating that stress or that anxiety enough
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  Speaker 1: times that your brains just like, forget about it. I'm done,
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  Speaker 1: I'm satiated. Yeah, very interesting. It is interesting. The brain
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  Speaker 1: is interesting, John, it certainly is well check agreed with me, everybody.
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  Speaker 1: So I'm going to end on a high note and
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  Speaker 1: say short stuff is out. Stuff you should Know is
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