I have just had this experience, listening to a podcast.
I was struggling a bit to focus, and tried to force myself to pay attention. This made me focus on the sounds I was hearing, and I recognised them as words, forming sentences. But the meaning of the sentence was not making it through to me.
It was as if there was a lens filtering out the meaning. Or maybe distracting me from assimilating the meaning, as I was instead focussed on the lens.
I was, I think, recognising each word as an English word which I knew (it wasn’t like a foreign language) but the overall meaning of the sentence I was hearing was lost on me.
For a few seconds, this state of hearing non-semantically was very clear to me. It was wild.
From this I deduce that the meaning of a sentence is not a concatenation of the meanings of its individual words, and maybe understanding of language happens in a different part of the brain (the distracted part in the above scenario).
#SomewhatRandomMusings
Jody Hughes
npub1wv…xfyne
2025-05-13 17:44:48 UTC
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npub1wv9exyvdhgmd2eumyudhagft6vn9nwuhr70gey3juc0lu2hshzwsvxfynePublished at
2025-05-13 17:44:48 UTCEvent JSON
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