Today I read this article with one of my students–it focuses on the role of repetition in listening to/enjoying music–and then started to make a list of things that felt analogous to the Diana Deutsch experiment described therein (to summarize, Deutsch recorded a spoken sentence, then looped a phrase “sometimes behave so strangely;” after hearing the loop numerous times, the original sentence (which on first lesson sounded wholly spoken if slightly melodic) now sounds like someone speaking before suddenly switching to singing))
A contrarian once (just now) told me that he thinks we train ourselves away (on a daily, hourly, microsecond-ly basis) from perceiving the fact that we’re essentially singing whenever we speak (that is, everything we say has a pitch) rather than being manipulated (as in the Deutsch experiment) toward hearing singing where it doesn’t exist. (Then he sang and whistled “so strangely” in a delightful but repetitive manner for half an hour.)
When I was in high school, seniors were tasked with writing an “I-Search” as our entire quarter grade for English class – a 15-20 page essay on whatever topic we chose, and with research that was more exploratory and participatory than a typical research paper. Mine was an attempt to “teach myself to hear English without understanding it,” as if it were just a set of phonemes divorced of meaning. I think I made a soundtrack to go along with it, and I definitely had a hard time finishing it: there were a number of sleepless nights that fall because I just couldn’t stop adding to it, and when it was finally time to print it out to turn in, our printer broke and my dad took me to Kinko’s at four in the morning, after which he sputtered, “You have to sleep! You have to go to bed!” (I did hear the meaning and content behind those words, but my dad was the first person I was able to – in real life; the first not-in-real-life voice was Bono’s – hear without understanding…so he was instrumental to the project in several ways!)
Although I’m sure I talked about “repeating a word until it loses all meaning” in the I-Search, I’d actually never heard it termed “semantic satiation” until today. I like it…”I’ve eaten so many consonants; I’m stuffed! No more room at the inn!”
I’ve digressed so much (and this – lampshading your digression – is something that I gently chided my college students for during my first semester of teaching when more than one of them turned in a draft that included the (non)-sentence: “But I digress.” They were not writing blogs, however) that I now need to return to what I promised in the first sentence of this post: things that feel analogous to Deutsch’s experiment in that they alter our perception even as we’re aware of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. They are! 1. The game (favored by those slightly older than the semantic satiation crowd) in which your friends hold your arms off the ground until they’re practically numb, and then lower them slowly so that they feel like they’re “going through the floor,” and 2. The rubber hand illusion.
