When you stare at a certain text for a long time or repeat a text for several times, you will think that the word is not the one you know before. It is awkward to read, just like writing wrong. Why do we feel this way? Why is it strange to have a word for a long time?
As early as the 18th century, some scholars discovered this phenomenon. In 1962, McGill University’s Ph.D., Leon James, defined this phenomenon as “semantic saturation.” He believed that the nervous system has a fixed feature: multiple repeated stimulations in a short period of time can cause inhibition of neural activity. It means to look at things for a long time, and my head is tired.
Simply put, this phenomenon occurs because the brain’s attention is diverted from control. When we stared at a word for a while, our brains felt that we were sick, why have we been watching it? Then he opened his own gap and only observed a certain part of the word. This makes us lose the overall feeling of the word, and then the meaning and pronunciation of the word becomes uncertain (my brain has its own ideas?).
In 1994, Zheng Zhaoming, a professor of psychology at Taiwan University, used “glyph saturation” and “glyph decomposition” to describe this phenomenon. This shows that Eastern scholars are more concerned about the “glyph collapse” argument, as a whole, and under long gaze, It will naturally collapse into a series of radicals and strokes in my mind, so even if the word is still there, the meaning will disappear.
