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... I was sitting right behind you
You know how, when you repeatedly say or write a word enough times, it starts sounding/looking weird? The technical psychological term for this is verbal satiation or semantic satiation:
And possibly why I can't tell whether I spelled a word correctly until I've looked away for a couple seconds.
While I'm on the subject of psychology research applicable to writers, a cogent study on treatments of writer's block, whose results were later reproduced in another study. I haven't found any further followups on this line, at least in refereed journals -- anecdotal stories abound, of course.
---L.
You know how, when you repeatedly say or write a word enough times, it starts sounding/looking weird? The technical psychological term for this is verbal satiation or semantic satiation:
Satiation may be described as the reduction in effectiveness of a stimulus with continued exposure. The concept has been invoked to account for a number of diverse phenomena, loss of word meaning with repetition, visual alternation during fixation of ambiguous figures, boredom, alternation behavior of rats in a T maze, and diagnosis of brain lesion. (Smith and Raygor: 1956)Or in other words, why writers need a break between drafts before they can look at it again with clear(er) eyes.
And possibly why I can't tell whether I spelled a word correctly until I've looked away for a couple seconds.
While I'm on the subject of psychology research applicable to writers, a cogent study on treatments of writer's block, whose results were later reproduced in another study. I haven't found any further followups on this line, at least in refereed journals -- anecdotal stories abound, of course.
---L.