(Catherine Falls Commercial/Montage about reproduction)
Each research area has its own explanation for the phenomenon – and these explanations complement each other, giving you a pretty solid picture of what happens in your head when you repeat a word. Word. Word. Word. Word.
For neuroscience, the question is the following: when someone insists a lot on a sequence of sounds, the brain realizes that repetition is not important. Therefore, he prevents the insistent word from being interpreted by the cortex – the region that takes care of more complex things like memory, attention, consciousness, language, etc. Result: the word continues to exist in your head. But it doesn’t get to the parts of the brain that would make sense of it.
Psychologists, in turn, explain that the repetition of a word, because it is monotonous, distracts us. And an empty brain has that well-known tendency to wander around: you end up paying attention to the act of speaking, the movement of the lips, breathing or even what you’re going to eat for dinner. Deep down, this is just a different way of saying that your cortex stopped paying attention to the word and went to think about the calf’s death.
Finally, linguistics tells us that repetition out of context causes us to stop relating to the thing in the world that the word refers to and pay attention only to the sound of it. A sound that, by itself, has no meaning: the sign is arbitrary, as Saussure said. A word only means something because all speakers of a language agree on that meaning.
Sources: Denise Menezes, neurologist, Antonio Carlos Amador Pereira, professor of psychology at PUC-SP, Ana Luiza Navas, professor of speech therapy at Santa Casa de São Paulo, Ernesto Giovanni Boccara, researcher in semiotics at Unicamp and Jean Cristtus Portela, PhD in Linguistics from Unesp.