For some, Passover means reuniting with family; for others, it means eating dry matzah and macaroons in Dewick; for others still it means nothing more than an ordinary week of school, after tanning on the shores of Mexico, Miami, Jamaica or, for the more altruistic Tuftonians, something more like a service trip to New Orleans.
For me, Passover consists of joining hundreds of Jews from all around the world (but mainly the East Coast) in traversing the continent to the desert (hotels) of Arizona (though no one has family there) in a strange reverse Exodus that amounts to a week of really good food, swimming−pool weather and a constant echo of exchanges of pleasantries with people barely recognizable from infrequent run−ins.
For some, this type of small talk is an art, especially when it involves two parties who know little about one another's personal lives and wish to collect just enough information to evade the appearance of apathy or forgetfulness and keep the charade going another year. I can assure you that these people make up some of the more amusing Passover guests to interact with and can be identified by their apparent fondness of ambiguous questions like "Oh, how's your baby?" — innocuous if you don't pick up on the convenient genderless, ageless quality of the word — and "How's school?" which could refer to any kind of educational institution in any region of the world.
That's not everyone, though. For others who travel to Arizona, it's a genuine delight to catch up with so many people they know, all in the same place at the same time. Either way, though, the sheer repetition gets tedious, and, after a while, our brains — very sophisticated machines that are easily bored — tend toward autopilot.
Really, my fellow migrators are just one case study of the human reaction to anything we experience repetitiously — romantic comedies, cliché birthday cards, pop music, invitations to cool events at Hotung, etc. After a while, they become meaningless.
Even individual words. Have you ever repeated a word out loud until it seemed to lose meaning? Try it. Pick a word and say it aloud repeatedly, focusing on its meaning, until the word no longer evokes the concept you usually associate it with and just seems like empty sound. Test one:
Lobster. Lobster. Lobster…
You might want to try this in private. Neurolinguists, though, have been doing it in labs since the '60s and call this lapse of meaning Semantic Satiation or, for our purposes, the Lobster Phenomenon.
The way it works has to do with the way our brains create meaning out of perception. When we hear a word — essentially just a jumble of sound — cells in the association areas of the cerebral cortex activate, sending a chemical signal connecting sound with meaning. Rapid repetition of words translates into rapid firing of those cells but with less intensity each time, until — due to biochemical fatigue — the brain fails, for a short while, to send a signal strong enough to effectively link word and meaning.
Of course, effectiveness of the Lobster Phenomenon depends on several things.
First, if you sidestep the brain's representational system by thinking about something else while uttering the word, none of this applies because the cells aren't working in the same way.
Second, some words have a lower or higher sensitivity to the Lobster Phenomenon than others. Because our brains are making sense of a context−less word, one whose meaning is inherently more related to its sound — like onomatopoeia — will hold onto meaning longer. Test two:
Zap. Zap. Zap …
And you have my permission to do that one out loud.
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Romy Oltuski is a junior majoring in English. She can be reached at Romy.Oltuski@tufts.edu.
