Word processing of the human brain.

Watcher
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Word processing of the human brain.

I just noticed something weird.

Has anyone else heard a certain word repeated so many times that it starts to lose it's meaning?

Like start saying mom once a second for a minute or two.   After a while all your brain starts to associate with that word is the sound made by saying mom.  I've also experienced this with other words like docter or what not.

Well I just noticed something.

I found a short video clip on You Tube that is less than 3 minutes long.  They use the word "fuck" 93 times during the video.  I personally found the video clip really amusing, so I just watched it several times in a row.

Now if the video substituted a non-swear word for fuck, my brain would start to lose the associations of that word.  I'd just notice the sound of the word.

However, since it was a curse word(I'm thinking), this did not occur.

I've read studies that words that are considered dirty are actually processed differently in our brains.  This leads to certain oddities of the occasional person having Tourette Syndrome all the way to getting amnesia so bad that they can only recall curse words but nothing else.

I don't know, just found it weird.

 

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geirj
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"Improvised Explosive

"Improvised Explosive Device".

Finally news organizations are referring to them simply as "roadside bombs".

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Ophios
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Slightly off topic: The

Slightly off topic: The thing about cuss words is that they are different becuase OTHER people made them different.

 

Example, I say fuck a lot.

IMO, I only say fuck a lot becuase people make a deal about it.

I can't quite explain it. yet.

 

Anyway, about the "Words lose meaning the more they get used". That has never happened to me. 

Although if a phrase comes up often enough, my mind tends to ignore it as it's superflous information.

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TheMuffinMan
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Ophios wrote: Slightly

Ophios wrote:

Slightly off topic: The thing about cuss words is that they are different becuase OTHER people made them different.

I don't think this is off topic at all. It is because of this that curse words are emotionally charged. Emotional cursing activates the limbic system (known as the four F sytem: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating) which regulates emotion and includes the hippocampus (involved in learning and memory) and the amygdala (controls automatic emotional responses, specifically with anger and fear). So cursing is produced by an interaction between the limbic system and the linguistic systems. Curse words that you don't have semantic or emotional associations with (like "nique ta mère" in french) would not activate the limbic system, even though nique ta mère means "fuck your mother." Read it again, knowing that, and it might.

Although I've never heard of a case with copralalia AND some kind of amnesia, it doesn't make sense to me that "they can only recall curse words but nothing else," because if enough of the linguistic system and its association areas are in tact to create curse words, it would be able to produce at least some other words as well.

As far as this having to do with Tourette's..

First of all, the kind of TS that involves cursing (copralalia) is a very rare form of Tourette's and totally not as representative as pop media makes it out to be, and there are other kinds of vocal tics such as echolalia, the involuntary repetition of others' words, and palilalia, repeating your own words. Most forms of TS are motor tics. My brother has TS, and his tics happen to be eye-twiching and making a certain circular motion with his left index finger.

Studies support that TS is caused by a malfuction in the way that dopamine is produced in the brain, causing too much of it to be released. Drugs that block dopamine have been successful for the treatment of motor tics. Copralalia in particular might be the cause of TS and OCD working together. The OCD part, I think, makes total sense because some people with copralalia repeatedly and involuntary repeat the curse word in their heads but not aloud most of the time.

Anyway, as far was the words losing meaning, it happens with any word, "fuck" would just take longer. Language is just symbolic representation, and when you hear or look at a single word long enough for it to not be a symbol.. well, there you go. Maybe because the word "fuck" has such a symbolic presense, partly due to its flexbility in language, it takes longer for it to lose that symbol of catharsis and anger and lust and pain and whatever other connotations you place on it. For me, saying fuck for about 30 seconds reduces it to the sound of air blowing through my upper teeth against my lower lip and the hard K sound, which I'm finding hard to describe here in text.


Renee Obsidianwords
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I have experienced exactly

I have experienced exactly what you have Watcher. In addition to a word losing meaning after repeating it many many times, have you ever written a word down and SWEAR it isn't a word that is spelled correctly? One afternoon  I troubled myself with the simple word "said"

I spelled it and corrected myself to "sayed" and then "sayd" then wrote "said" again and that still didn't look right.... I wonder why the brain does that.

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Renee Obsidianwords

Renee Obsidianwords wrote:
I spelled it and corrected myself to "sayed" and then "sayd" then wrote "said" again and that still didn't look right.... I wonder why the brain does that.

 

I don't have any problem with words like "paraphernalia" or "erroneous" but I sometimes have trouble with the simplest words that I've used hundreds of thousands of times.

Like the word "dose". Sometimes I want to spell it "does." In fact, even now I'm not sure which is right.

And the word 'important". Sometimes I stop and wonder, "Is it spelled important or inportant?"

Maybe too much weed in the 70s.

 

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