From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um.

Answering those questions that make you go.

The Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Ruby Guthrie. Do you have a favorite word? I'm not necessarily talking about a word that means something that you love, but a word you like just because of how it sounds.

Aurora is really beautiful.

And here's another one, serendipity. Or how about quidditch? There are just so many good sounds in that word. Quidditch. Quidditch. Whenever I repeat, quidditch, quidditch.

Whenever I repeat a word, though, I notice that it just starts to sound weird.

Have you ever noticed that?

Hello, my name is Amelia, and I am from Wales.

My question is, why do words sound funny when you keep repeating them?

Words consist of different sounds, and our brain mapped these sounds to different meanings and concepts.

So, for example, when you hear the word book, it maps it onto the idea of a book.

Hi, I'm Shahini Bhittasali.

I'm a postdoctoral researcher in linguistics at the University of Maryland.

So I study how our brains help us understand language.

So when you keep repeating the word book continuously,

you actually end up focusing on the sounds of the words itself, like

bur-u-kha. And those sounds itself have nothing really to do with the meaning of book.

Bur-u-kha. So after a while, what happens is that you kind of lose the meaning, and it kind of ends up

sounding funny to you. Per-u-kir. So some people have said that this has to do with your brain

kind of getting tired.

It's a kind of fatigue.

Because if you keep repeating the word,

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