- Performance disclaimers need updating
- The unintended consequences of health warnings
- Lots of idea-generating content
In 1962, a young graduate student at McGill University called Leon Jakobovits submitted his doctoral thesis, which he called ‘Effects of Repeated Stimulation on Cognitive Aspects of Behaviour: Some Experiments on the Phenomenon of Semantic Satiation’.
Despite the jargon-heavy title, the psychology researcher was interested in a feeling that is probably familiar to us all. Specifically, Jakobovits wanted to explore why repetition can cause a word or phrase to lose its meaning and dissolve into empty sounds or shapes, and how this “reduction in the meaningfulness of symbols through their repeated presentation affects thinking”.