When we were kids, my twin and I invented a weird game. We would take a word and repeat it ad nauseam till the string connecting the syllables came undone, scattering the syllables like errant beads in a gust of wind. Broken down into mere sounds, the word would quickly lose its shape, image, and meaning, and we would squeal with mirth, overjoyed with a simple game that turned veritable things into non-things. Wicked witchery, it seemed.
Begun, the Bengali term for eggplant, suffered such a fate on a nondescript afternoon in the 1990s. On their palate, it afforded two bored kids much happiness than it ever did on their plate.
We knew nothing about semantic satiation back then. Imagine my sheer delight to discover that the phenomenon wasn't unique to a pair of zany twins but rather a much-researched concept in many disciplines, including psychology and economics.
The term semantic satiation was coined in 1962 by Leon James, a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii’s College of Social Sciences. He conducted a number of experiments to study the implications of satiation in people's behaviour—and a cat's too. Before him, other scientists had called it lapse of meaning, verbal transformation, verbal satiation, and reactive inhibition among other things. The concept itself had been introduced decades earlier in 1907.
The basic science behind semantic satiation is simple. Our brain fires impulses in response to a stimulus like the sound of the word. We immediately conjure an image of the thing corresponding to the word, which corresponds to the string of sounds. Or we remember a memory associated with the thing. After the brain has fired the first impulse, it requires more energy to fire the second impulse, even more to fire the third, and so on. When a stimulus is repeated quickly for a considerable duration, the available energy in the brain is depleted, and it may altogether stop firing an impulse in response to the stimulus.
That's when all meaning is lost, and the word disintegrates into mere sounds. As kids, we found this a pleasurable exercise. But repetition leads to loss of pleasure too. Songs that my twin plays on a loop as soon as they release are also songs we don’t hear a few weeks down the line. By then, they have stopped eliciting emotional reactions in her.
We didn’t need scientists to teach us satiation. From the first primitive human who gluttonised on a chunky piece of meat to my music-loving twin, we’ve all learned it the practical way.
Satiation is why a repetitive job gets tougher with time, despite practised ease. The term for it is work decrement.
Satiation is also why salespeople in the perfume aisle of a cosmetic store keep coffee beans handy. Exposed to a myriad fragrances throughout the day, they are likely to suffer from olfactory fatigue or noseblindness. It’s not always a bummer, though. I for one, have noseblindness to thank profusely for my current inability to notice the cloying, thick aroma of baked goodies from the biscuit factory next door. Pleasure at the smell had given way to nausea after the first few days.
Is apathy a function of similar satiation as well?
What makes us turn the other way at the face of other people’s crises? The fact that they are happening to others, the fact that they may not pose immediate danger to us; but also the fact that our sense organs have become inured to the onslaught of reportage, images, critical commentary, and emotional discussions on one distressing event after another. It now takes a stimulus of a much larger amplitude—in other words, something with tremendous shock value—to open our rusty floodgates of empathy. Otherwise, we scroll right past disturbing news bits into the comfort of frivolity.
Our brain tires from doling out empathy indiscriminately. I should retract that sentence. Empathy cannot be indiscriminate since it is inextricably linked to context and subjectivity. My twin and I do not feel the same kind of empathy for the same people or similar situations. Some day, we shall compare notes and trace patterns.
Empathy is putting ourselves in another’s shoes, feeling what she/he feels. We are coded to feel empathy, thanks to a special set of nerve cells called mirror neurons, the emergence of which neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran calls a turning point in human evolution.
Mirror neurons fire up when we watch someone perform an action, as though we are performing it ourselves. They help us learn through imitation. Since to imitate one must put oneself in another’s shoes, or rather, empathise, we could attribute our inherent empathy to mirror neurons.
Apathy as witnessed in autism does correlate with the abnormal activity of mirror neurons. Could apathy then be a result of reactive inhibition of mirror neurons, alongside other factors? Do people who feel less empathy also have trouble imitating and learning?
I haven’t been able to find answers yet. I don't suppose the answers are simple.
But in my search for answers, I did find a direction, a nugget of hope. One way to lessen our apathy, even in times of oversaturation, is surrounding ourselves with people who feel and practise empathy. We learn by imitation. I know I do.
The other temporary fix is perhaps a short break to allow ourselves to replenish our empathy stores.
On that nondescript afternoon in the 1990s, my twin and I gave begun a rest and got busy with other things. When we returned, the vegetable had a distinct meaning, shape, colour, and taste, as though it had never been anything else, least of all a nonsensical joke.
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