In shortReaders who land here meaning Semantic Satiation rather than Jamais vu are usually searching for phrases like “why does a word stop looking like a word”, “semantic satiation explained”, “said a word too many times and it lost meaning”.

In shortSemantic satiation. 1962 — Leon Jakobovits James coins 'semantic satiation' in his McGill doctoral thesis, supervised by Wallace Lambert. The pair had published on the same effect under the earlier label 'verbal satiation' in 1960.

1. 1962

   Semantic Satiation. Leon Jakobovits James coins 'semantic satiation' in his McGill doctoral thesis, supervised by Wallace Lambert. The pair had published on the same effect under the earlier label 'verbal satiation' in 1960.

2. 2021

   Jamais Vu. Moulin, Bell, Turunen, Baharin and O'Connor show it can be produced deliberately in healthy people. About 70% of 94 undergraduates stopped copying a word because it had started to feel peculiar, typically after around a minute and thirty repetitions. A second experiment using only the word 'the' produced it in 55% of participants. The work won the 2023 Ig Nobel Prize for Literature.

• Semantic SatiationCognitive Biases & the Mind
• Jamais VuCognitive Biases & the Mind