The case for cursing

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Speaker 5 The Science Museum in London is one of the oldest science museums in the world.

Speaker 5 It's got James Watts steam engine, it's got Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, it's even got this mechanical clock from the 1300s.

Speaker 8 It's this kind of serious, educational, family-friendly place.

Speaker 5 But then, one night every month, around 6 p.m., they kick out all the kids and the vibes start to shift.

Speaker 12 They're opening bars, they have this silent disco, they have lots of live experiments and they have lots of college students in.

Speaker 8 This is Emma Byrne. She's a neuroscientist who was working at the museum a few years ago.

Speaker 12 And I was looking for good sort of sensory neuroscience experiments that I could do as kind of demonstrations on these people that were sort of wandering through the science museum of a Thursday evening.

Speaker 8 Her job was to teach some basic scientific concepts, but she wanted something kind of wacky so she could get the attention of all these drunk college students.

Speaker 15 Shall we go and get smashed?

Speaker 11 So she decided to try this weird experiment she'd heard of.

Speaker 12 You get people to come up.

Speaker 16 I am Hamed Hamed.

Speaker 12 And you say, do you want to do this experiment on pain tolerance and swearing?

Speaker 6 Pain tolerance and swearing.

Speaker 8 And this is the part where I should tell you that there are going to be all kinds of swears. We're not bleeping in this episode.

Speaker 5 Just a huge heads up.

Speaker 11 It was like I'm fucking with you.

Speaker 17 I am not fucking with you.

Speaker 7 Anyway, here's the experiment.

Speaker 8 If you stick your hand in a bucket of water, so cold that it's actually painful, will swearing help you tolerate that pain and let you keep your hand in there longer?

Speaker 12 And you've got some fairly, you know, people who've had a couple of drinks by this point and are fairly game for it.

Speaker 7 I am not fucking drunk.

Speaker 13 But Emma really wanted to teach some scientific concepts here, not just try and get people swearing for shits and giggles.

Speaker 7 Not fucking drunk.

Speaker 11 She needed a control for her experiment, something people could say as a test while holding their hands in ice water.

Speaker 12 So you asked them for a neutral word to say, describe a table.

Speaker 11 Woody. And then she asked them to pick a swear word.

Speaker 12 The words I've had have ranged from the sort of usual fucks and shits.

Speaker 7 Fucking shit.

Speaker 12 To bollockses.

Speaker 12 To slightly more colorful portmanteau words.

Speaker 15 Alright, you cop wumbles.

Speaker 11 The students would stick their hands in the ice water twice, first to test the neutral word, woody, and then to test the swear word,

Speaker 13 and Emma would flip a coin to see which one went first.

Speaker 12 Usually if I'm doing this in a pub, I usually ask people if they think head or tails is dirtier and then choose whichever one of those is going to be the swear word. Arguments for both, right?

Speaker 12 Absolutely. It tells me a lot about the person I'm talking to.
And that allows me to make sure that there isn't any primacy or recency effect. So you're randomizing.

Speaker 7 Fuck you, science.

Speaker 8 Then Emma would lay out the rules for each ice water attempt.

Speaker 12 All they're allowed to say is just the one word from that category.

Speaker 16 So, woody. Over and over again.

Speaker 2 Or shit.

Speaker 12 Until they reach the point where they feel they can't keep their hand in that water anymore.

Speaker 6 The longer the students can keep their hand in the water, the higher their pain tolerance. And it turns out, swearing really fucking helps.

Speaker 12 Yeah, if you were saying woody, you might be able to keep your hand in ice water for about 90 seconds, But if you're saying shit, it's probably going to be, you know, two, two and a half minutes.

Speaker 20 Okay, it's worth saying that Emma's experiment with drunk college students, it's not exactly publishable scientific work.

Speaker 12 Because I'm essentially doing this in a frat house. It's just, you're not getting good data here.

Speaker 20 But seeing just how excited the students were about this sort of experiment, it made her kind of fall in love with the science of swearing.

Speaker 12 The fact that there were scientists studying swearing just seemed to blow people's minds, and it kind of blew mine as well.

Speaker 20 So she started reading every paper on swearing she could get her hands on.

Speaker 12 I just fell down this research rabbit hole. You're looking at a paper and there's maybe five or six citations that you're thinking, I really want to read those.

Speaker 12 And each of those has got five or six citations and each of those, and before you know it, you're in a pile of papers that's sort of above your head.

Speaker 10 But as she dug into the research, she found that this ice water experiment doesn't just work on drunk people.

Speaker 20 It's been replicated tons of times in way more reputable settings.

Speaker 12 And it is so incredibly robust.

Speaker 10 So Emma started doing this experiment all over the place.

Speaker 12 And everywhere I do it, I get the same result.

Speaker 5 It's almost like this kind of magic incantation.

Speaker 11 Like, Abra, come motherfucking Dabra, and poof.

Speaker 21 Increase your pain tolerance every time.

Speaker 18 But if you change just one letter of this this spell, the effect vanishes.

Speaker 12 There's a study that's been done using what we call minced oaths, so things that sound like swearing but aren't, so fudge, sugar, that kind of thing.

Speaker 23 Fudge.

Speaker 12 Doesn't work at all. It has to be the real thing.
And the stronger you experience that swear word as being, the better the painkiller it is.

Speaker 7 Only I didn't say fudge.

Speaker 4 I said, well, I'm a mushroom cloud land motherfucker, motherfucker.

Speaker 12 Which raises all these intriguing questions about what's happening when we're swearing.

Speaker 6 This week on Unexplainable, how does this magic spell actually work?

Speaker 8 How can a word, a very particular kind of word, be powerful enough to reduce something as visceral as pain?

Speaker 24 So in order to understand how swearing can act like this sort of magic word that reduces pain, I feel like we got to get more basic for a second.

Speaker 14 So what is a swear?

Speaker 12 The most common definition is that it expresses something that is considered taboo.

Speaker 14 So something you're not allowed to say.

Speaker 12 Yeah, something you're not allowed to say.

Speaker 12 And that's the thing that makes it such a slippery beast is that what do we mean by not allowed to? Right, right. But the fact that we tell ourselves that we shouldn't is what gives it its power.

Speaker 12 It is unlike any other part of our language. And if it weren't for the taboo part, it just wouldn't work.

Speaker 24 I imagine if it relates to things you're not allowed to say, it must differ a lot across cultures or across the world.

Speaker 12 Absolutely. So, and please, Canadian listeners, I'm so sorry for my terrible pronunciation, but words like huste

Speaker 12 and tabenak,

Speaker 12 so the things that are to do with the Catholic Mass,

Speaker 12 things that are to do with the communion,

Speaker 12 are considered to be really offensive to the point that they turn up in French-Canadian hip-hop.

Speaker 12 Whereas if you said that in, say, you know, Paris or whatever, they'd be confused because their swearing vocabulary is a lot more like British English or American English.

Speaker 12 There's an awful lot of bodily functions.

Speaker 12 Sexual behaviour.

Speaker 15 That's like trying to use a croissant as a fucking dildo. It doesn't do the job and it makes a fucking mess.

Speaker 12 Parts of the body.

Speaker 15 Dick dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick.

Speaker 27 How many dicks is that?

Speaker 23 A lot.

Speaker 12 There are cultures in the world where names of diseases are hugely taboo. So I think it's Dutch.
Things

Speaker 12 like typhus. Difus.
And cancer.

Speaker 16 Gangerlier.

Speaker 11 Which is basically the worst.

Speaker 12 Every culture has its own particular choice of words.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it means your mother's vagina.

Speaker 1 Such empula.

Speaker 6 Which means suck my dick.

Speaker 11 Such a pula. Oh, come on.

Speaker 12 Everything that you think could be employed as a swear word probably is somewhere.

Speaker 4 And the other one I know is djule lomo,

Speaker 12 which means fuck your mum.

Speaker 8 And all of these swears that sound totally different, they're all having this kind of impact on the brain.

Speaker 12 Yeah, you need to go further inwards. So it's not the sounds that your mouth is making, it's the activity that your brain's experiencing.

Speaker 22 So then, what do we actually know about what's happening?

Speaker 29 in the brain when we're swearing.

Speaker 12 So usually in order to produce spoken words or produce signed words, there are parts of the motor cortex that are devoted to language that do that.

Speaker 12 I'm using an awful lot of areas that for about 95% of us are kind of on the left side of the brain.

Speaker 12 But when we're swearing, particularly when we're swearing emotively, rather than if I were just to give you an example of a swear word right now, we also see activity in far more parts of our brain than most of our normal language.

Speaker 29 So the idea is that swearing seems to originate maybe or be controlled by a part of the brain that is not language?

Speaker 12 It's more like,

Speaker 12 if you're familiar with the term in computer science or engineering of redundancy,

Speaker 12 where there are multiple ways in which swearing can be produced. And if you lose one, there's still a good chance that another one is still online.

Speaker 12 So the amygdala gets involved, starts signaling whether or not there's something truly stressful going on.

Speaker 22 Remind me what the amygdala is again?

Speaker 12 Oh, the amygdala amygdala are like small parts of the brain that say, you know, oh, there's something we should be alert to here.

Speaker 12 So we know if you stimulate the amygdala during brain surgery, that swearing is involuntarily produced. It almost acts like a kind of a go button for swearing.

Speaker 12 We know that the emotional processing parts of the brain definitely get involved. So if you have a stroke on the right-hand side,

Speaker 12 You lose the ability to understand jokes and people who've had that kind of injury just tend to stop swearing. So it's almost like that loss of non-literal speech also takes swearing with it.

Speaker 8 So it's super connected to the right side of the brain then, not just the language side.

Speaker 12 Yeah. And the most astonishing thing about that is that you can have the entirety of your left hemisphere removed.
If you have a very invasive cancer, for example, or a terrible brain injury.

Speaker 12 And it is possible to survive without the entire left hemisphere of the brain, but you're losing a lot of really important stuff.

Speaker 12 So things that control this kind of volitional language that I'm using now.

Speaker 12 However, for people who've had that left hemisphere ectomy, who are what's generally called a phasic, meaning without speech, they do still speak.

Speaker 12 But the things that they speak in tend to be childhood endearments and swear words, the two really big, emotionally valent forms of language that we have.

Speaker 21 So, just so we're on the same page here, people can have the entire main language hemisphere of their brain removed and they can still swear?

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 12 I think about a chap who lost the entirety of his left hemisphere, could no longer produce volitional language, was doing the tests that he was put through by the physicians who were dealing with him.

Speaker 12 So, I would show him things like a picture of a watch, and they would painstakingly record how long it took to make any kind of sound whatsoever. So watch,

Speaker 12 no, can't do it. Give me the next one.
All right, chair, similar thing. Bed, similar thing.
Picture of Ronald Reagan.

Speaker 12 And it says in this paper, the patient responded with a surprisingly fluent production of swearing.

Speaker 12 Ronald Reagan! Don't write down what it was!

Speaker 12 Oh my god, that's a ronald

Speaker 12 What is the picture that would elicit swears that it's Ronald Reagan? His was Ronald Reagan. Oh my God.
You know, we have no idea if he said fucking asshole or whatever.

Speaker 20 Or fucking great president, right?

Speaker 12 Fucking great. Well, he might have struggled towards great and president.
Right. But yeah, like either.

Speaker 20 He might have been the biggest Reagan fan ever.

Speaker 12 He might have been the biggest Reagan fan. It might have been fuck yeah.
It could have been fuck him. We don't know.

Speaker 24 So we know swearing is connected to way more parts of the brain than normal languages, that it's in touch with our emotions in this unique way.

Speaker 11 But how exactly does it reduce pain?

Speaker 12 We're still trying to figure this out in detail, but there's a lot that we still don't know.

Speaker 19 We'll get into all of that when we're back.

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Speaker 20 Okay, so, Emma, we know that swearing isn't like normal language, that you can lose the entire half of your brain that controls language and you can still swear, especially if you're looking at pictures of Ronald Reagan.

Speaker 29 So how do we get from swearing being this special kind of word to actually impacting pain?

Speaker 12 Okay, so when the swearing is either generated in an emotional place or registers in an emotional place, heart rates go up. Pupils tend to constrict.
Your hands tend to get a bit more sweaty.

Speaker 12 All of the things that happen when we know that we're getting prepared for some sort of emotional event, it could be that it's helping us to withstand pain or to have more stamina because we're getting activation in those exact parts of our body that previously responded to the sound of a saber-toothed tiger growling.

Speaker 12 You know, here's this sound that's very emotive. So even though the word fuck, it's the same sound whether or not I'm sort of saying, fuck that guy, fuck him, or, oh, that's fucking brilliant.

Speaker 12 Your brain and more importantly, your body, the entire sort of distributed sense of I'm ready to fight or to flee is responding differently.

Speaker 25 So the idea here is that like saying fuck is almost like pressing the button on your

Speaker 8 most basic primal nervous system to say like, get ready.

Speaker 29 It's like you're being prepared to fight.

Speaker 12 It really seems to, yeah so because of how

Speaker 12 slowly the body creates and then disposes of things like adrenaline and cortisol it's very hard to get the kind of rapid snapshots of whether or not you know it's boosting adrenaline and so on but all of the proxy variables for adrenaline like pupillary response or sweaty palms or fast heart rate suggest that yeah this cascade of neurotransmitters and of hormones and of the activation even of the rate of our breathing, all gets us ready to say, whatever it is, I'm ready for it.

Speaker 24 Okay, so one idea is that we have a higher pain tolerance in fight-or-flight situations, and this is kind of triggering that.

Speaker 24 What are some other potential hypotheses for how swearing might reduce pain?

Speaker 12 So, one of the other competing hypotheses is the fact that because swearing is so redundant, so distributed in the brain, that it's just taking more effort and is therefore far more distracting.

Speaker 12 That if you've got limited cognitive availability to think, you know, am I in pain?

Speaker 12 Maybe that's just really distracting.

Speaker 12 And then the other one is that actually by swearing, we may not be genning up the parasympathetic nervous system.

Speaker 12 What we might be doing is allowing ourselves to siphon off some of that activation to sort of say, look, I've put some of this bad load into the world.

Speaker 24 So like letting off steam, just kind of coping with stressful situations.

Speaker 12 Yeah. Sort of going and punching a punch bag for a long time.
So the swearing either might gen us up and bring this response or it might allow us to pass through that more quickly.

Speaker 14 So if we take what we know about the different ways swears might be impacting our pain perception and we bring in the thing you mentioned at the top that we don't get this effect with these sort of semi-swears like fudge sickle.

Speaker 24 I imagine I'd only be getting the effect of pain reduction if I said something that I understood as a swear, right?

Speaker 24 Like if I said a swear in a language I'm not fluent in, like Pendejo or Gaycock and Afenyam or something like that, I imagine I'm not going to get that painkilling effect.

Speaker 12 Yeah, and we know thanks to

Speaker 12 some research on people who become bilingual either before adolescence or after adolescence.

Speaker 12 If you had been bilingual from birth or in your teens and pendejo had been something that you'd heard among your peers growing up, you would have imbibed this sort of emotional link between the word, the sound, the feel of it in your own mouth, and the emotional taboo response and the feeling in your body.

Speaker 12 It's the fact that what is happening is happening so deeply in the brain, and it's happening because of the way our relationships between sounds, movements, and feelings have been idiosyncratically laid down in our late adolescence that, yeah, you can't prescribe a particular swear word for everyone.

Speaker 25 Okay, so the idea here is that for a swear of any language to get your power, you have to be introduced to it and learn that you're not allowed to say it very, very early on.

Speaker 8 It's got to like get buried into your brain somehow. Is that the idea?

Speaker 12 It does. And it gets linked with the emotions in your brain by seeing the emotional response that other people have.

Speaker 12 So, for example, for me, the word twat, I can still feel the smack around the back of my head that I got when I first used that word.

Speaker 29 So, if we zoom out a little bit on this overall question of swearing and pain,

Speaker 24 what are some of the biggest unknowns?

Speaker 12 We still don't know whether or not there's a dose effect or whether or not the fact that you swear a lot, whether that has much impact on the way in which it affects you when you need it for painkilling.

Speaker 12 The two competing hypotheses are that if you swear a lot, then you're going to become habituated to it, like some painkilling drugs.

Speaker 12 And obviously the competing hypothesis to that is just no, that doesn't happen. And so far the jury seems to be out.
The data that have been collected point in either direction.

Speaker 22 And is there anything that makes that particularly hard to figure out or that makes this question of swearing and pain hard to study in general?

Speaker 12 Partly it's the fact that it is so idiosyncratic. Each and every one of us has our own unique relationship between words and emotions.

Speaker 12 So that makes it really hard because you can't sort of isolate it. And the other thing is, is that swearing is usually relational.

Speaker 12 I mean, in the cold water task, you're kind of taking away as much of the relationship as possible. You're swearing, if anything, it's at the cold water.

Speaker 12 But when swearing swearing happens in the world,

Speaker 12 we do it as a communicative act. We do it because we want to elicit an emotional response from another person.
So that then adds another layer of complexity.

Speaker 12 You've got what's going on in the brain and the body of the swearer. What's going on in the brain and the body of the hearer?

Speaker 12 You can never just point at a word and go, we can understand that swear word. Each individual swearing act is essentially its own thing.

Speaker 24 So then this takes us way beyond just killing pain, right?

Speaker 12 I mean, it has this pain-killing ability, but it also sends social messages to other people.

Speaker 12 And some of the ways in which those social messages work is by altering the person who's listening to you's emotional nervous system.

Speaker 12 I still remember my daughter's first swear word. We got on holiday and the place was absolute bedlam.
And of course, my daughter was at toddling stage and wanted to run around.

Speaker 12 And so I said, look, i know we don't use a high chair at home but just for now i'm going to put you in this high chair because you absolutely have to stay put we'll have our dinner and then we'll go outside we'll run around when you're finished and she sat there eating and then all of a sudden i'm talking to my husband i think i heard this little voice very clearly beside me going mummy

Speaker 12 get me out this fucking high chair

Speaker 12 And I thought, Joe, I'm fine with this because three months ago, that would have been that kind of back arching, food throwing screaming you know like the projectile weeping kind of tantrum

Speaker 12 and it had turned into this powerful word that could get my emotional attention and say look you know i'm this pissed off with this high chair i have got to get out of it without having the full-blown meltdown which It is glorious.

Speaker 12 I was very, very happy with that.

Speaker 12 It seems functionally very helpful to have something that goes between, I'm going to express that I'm a little bit frustrated with this, and actually, full-on, you know, trying to choke a bitch.

Speaker 12 And then having this register that's in between the two,

Speaker 12 that swearing register is incredibly useful.

Speaker 27 If you want to learn more about the science of swearing, check out Emma Byrne's excellent book. It's called Swearing is Good For You.

Speaker 11 This episode was produced by me, Noam Hasenfeld.

Speaker 27 We had editing from Brian Resnick and Jorge Just with help from Meredith Hodenat, who also manages our team.

Speaker 27 Mixing and sound design from Erica Huang, fact-checking from Angeli Mercado, music from me, Christian Ayala is spinning the globe, Manding Wen is crossing the country, and Bird Pinkerton turned to the doctopus, who handed her a small blinking device.

Speaker 23 This is a beak beam, said the doctopus.

Speaker 7 If there's a beak nearby, you won't miss it.

Speaker 12 Just remember, be careful of the bird animates.

Speaker 11 If you're looking for transcripts of our show, we've got a link in the show notes. And if you have thoughts about this episode or ideas for the show, please email us.

Speaker 27 We're at unexplainable at Vox.com.

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Speaker 11 Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week.

Speaker 9 One quick thing before we go.

Speaker 20 There's this one last bit of research that Emma did on swearing that I just love.

Speaker 22 It really gets at just how many different things swears can communicate.

Speaker 14 And it does it in what I think is the funniest possible way.

Speaker 12 During the soccer World Cup, we looked at people's swearing on Twitter and we found something

Speaker 12 that we called the fuck-shit ratio. So fuck goes up whenever anything happens for your team.
It could be scoring, it could be conceding a goal, it could be an injury.

Speaker 12 But when shit goes up at the same time, you know it's negative.

Speaker 12 So by looking at the way in which for a given hashtag, the frequency of fuck has gone up, but shit hasn't, you can build these predictive models that will basically flag for you saying, I think something good's happened for this team.

Speaker 23 Fucking what the fucking? Fuck! Who the fuck? Fuck this fucking... How did you do fucking fucks?

Speaker 23 Fuck!

Speaker 19 Certainly illustrates the diversity of the word.

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