Staring at a totally normal word and repeating it out loud twenty times will cause your brain to suddenly reject it as a meaningless string of alien gibberish.

A closer look

Staring at a totally normal word and repeating it out loud twenty times will cause your brain to suddenly reject it as a meaningless string of alien gibberish. Semantic satiation is a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds. When you fire the same neural pathways over and over again by saying the word bowl, the neurons undergo reactive inhibition and refuse to keep sending the meaning of the word to your conscious mind. Your highly advanced biological hardware literally gets bored of doing the exact same tiny task and goes on a temporary strike, leaving you staring at your cereal bowl questioning the fundamental nature of human language. It is a fantastic reminder that our grip on reality is so incredibly fragile that it can be instantly shattered just by talking to yourself like a lunatic for forty-five seconds!