The case for cursing

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

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.

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

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

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

This is Emma Byrne.

She's a neuroscientist who was working at the museum a few years ago.

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.

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.

Shall we go and get smashed?

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

You get people to come up.

I am Hamed Hamed.

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

Pain tolerance and swearing.

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.

Just a huge heads up.

It was like I'm fucking with you.

I am not fucking with you.

Anyway, here's the experiment.

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?

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.

I am not fucking drunk.

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

Not fucking drunk.

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

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

Woody.

And then she asked them to pick a swear word.

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

Fucking shit.

To bollockses.

To slightly more colorful portmanteau words.

Alright, you cop wumbles.

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,

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

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?

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.

Fuck you, science.

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

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

So, woody.

Over and over again.

Or shit.

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

The longer the students can keep their hand in the water, the higher their pain tolerance.

And it turns out, swearing really fucking helps.

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.

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

Because I'm essentially doing this in a frat house.

It's just, you're not getting good data here.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

And it is so incredibly robust.

So Emma started doing this experiment all over the place.

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

It's almost like this kind of magic incantation.

Like, Abra, come motherfucking Dabra, and poof.

Increase your pain tolerance every time.

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

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.

Fudge.

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.

Only I didn't say fudge.

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

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

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

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

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.

So what is a swear?

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

So something you're not allowed to say.

Yeah, something you're not allowed to say.

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.

It is unlike any other part of our language.

And if it weren't for the taboo part, it just wouldn't work.

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

Absolutely.

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

and tabenak,

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

things that are to do with the communion,

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

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.

There's an awful lot of bodily functions.

Sexual behaviour.

That's like trying to use a croissant as a fucking dildo.

It doesn't do the job and it makes a fucking mess.

Parts of the body.

Dick dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick.

How many dicks is that?

A lot.

There are cultures in the world where names of diseases are hugely taboo.

So I think it's Dutch.

Things

like typhus.

Difus.

And cancer.

Gangerlier.

Which is basically the worst.

Every culture has its own particular choice of words.

Yeah, it means your mother's vagina.

Such empula.

Which means suck my dick.

Such a pula.

Oh, come on.

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

And the other one I know is djule lomo,

which means fuck your mum.

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

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.

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

in the brain when we're swearing.

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.

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

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.

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

It's more like,

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

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.

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

Remind me what the amygdala is again?

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.

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.

We know that the emotional processing parts of the brain definitely get involved.

So if you have a stroke on the right-hand side,

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

Yeah.

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.

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,

no, can't do it.

Give me the next one.

All right, chair, similar thing.

Bed, similar thing.

Picture of Ronald Reagan.

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

Ronald Reagan!

Don't write down what it was!

Oh my god, that's a ronald

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.

Or fucking great president, right?

Fucking great.

Well, he might have struggled towards great and president.

Right.

But yeah, like either.

He might have been the biggest Reagan fan ever.

He might have been the biggest Reagan fan.

It might have been fuck yeah.

It could have been fuck him.

We don't know.

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.

But how exactly does it reduce pain?

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

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

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Good morning, my neighbors!

And fuck you!

Yes!

Yes!

Fuck you, too!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

It really seems to, yeah so because of how

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.

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

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

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.

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

Maybe that's just really distracting.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Yeah, and we know thanks to

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

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.

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.

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.

It's got to like get buried into your brain somehow.

Is that the idea?

It does.

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

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.

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

what are some of the biggest unknowns?

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

But when swearing swearing happens in the world,

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

get me out this fucking high chair

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

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.

I was very, very happy with that.

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.

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

that swearing register is incredibly useful.

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.

This episode was produced by me, Noam Hasenfeld.

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

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.

This is a beak beam, said the doctopus.

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

Just remember, be careful of the bird animates.

If you're looking for transcripts of our show, we've got a link in the show notes.

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One quick thing before we go.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Fucking what the fucking?

Fuck!

Who the fuck?

Fuck this fucking...

How did you do fucking fucks?

Fuck!

Certainly illustrates the diversity of the word.

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