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Speaker 1: We all know people who hate the word moist, But

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Speaker 1: why are they okay with synonyms like damp or muggy

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Speaker 1: or wet. What's going on in their brains and what

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Speaker 1: does this have to do with shapes or autism or synesthesia.

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Speaker 1: Welcome to another episode of Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman,

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Speaker 1: all about the magical three pounds of matter that constitute

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Speaker 1: your reality. In today's episode, we're going to talk about

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Speaker 1: a wild and relatively new example of the differences between

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Speaker 1: people's internal cosmoses. We're going to talk about word aversion.

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Speaker 1: Imagine that you find a tribe of people with little

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Speaker 1: contact with the outside world, and they show you that

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Speaker 1: they have some shapes that they draw. One of them

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Speaker 1: is a round, blobby object, and another shape is a sharp,

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Speaker 1: spiky star pattern. Now you figure out that one of

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Speaker 1: these they call bouba and the other they call kiki.

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Speaker 1: And the question I have for you is which do

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Speaker 1: you think is which is the blobby thing called kiki

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Speaker 1: and the starburst thing is called buba? Or would you

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Speaker 1: guess it's the other way around? If you are like

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Speaker 1: essentially everyone else on the planet, you guessed that the

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Speaker 1: blobby object was called buba, and the sharp object was

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Speaker 1: called kiki. Now, the buba kiki effect was something studied

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Speaker 1: in a psychology paper a century ago, and it was

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Speaker 1: a little surprising because essentially everybody gives the same answer,

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Speaker 1: linking the soft sounding word with the soft looking object

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Speaker 1: and vice versa. But this is surprising because in general,

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Speaker 1: there's really not supposed to be a relationship between the

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Speaker 1: sound of a word and what it looks like. But

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Speaker 1: what this tells us is that we sometimes have relationships

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Speaker 1: across the senses. And if you heard my episode on synesthesia,

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Speaker 1: episode four, you'll know that a fraction of people, probably

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Speaker 1: between five and ten percent, have this kind of blending

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Speaker 1: of the senses in more unusual ways. For example, they

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Speaker 1: might see letters and that triggers a color experience for them,

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Speaker 1: where they might hear something, and that triggers a visual

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Speaker 1: shape for them where they might taste something and that

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Speaker 1: puts a feeling on their fingertips and so on. Now,

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Speaker 1: I'm going to come back to this issue of synesthesia.

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Speaker 1: That want to return to the issue of the sound

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Speaker 1: of a word. So let me begin by pointing out

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Speaker 1: that in general, the sound of a word has no

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Speaker 1: relationship to its meaning. You can call a car an

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Speaker 1: automobile or a vehicle or whatever. We don't just call

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Speaker 1: it a room. So the sound that we make with

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Speaker 1: our mouth car is usually quite arbitrary, and you can

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Speaker 1: see this by comparing across languages, where you can call

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Speaker 1: it a mahonite or che or vatur or whatever. So

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Speaker 1: the sound of a word and its meaning are typically unconnected.

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Speaker 1: But it's not always so simple, because sometimes we do

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Speaker 1: find a strange relationship between sound and meaning. Think of

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Speaker 1: on amotopeia, where a word imitates phonetically, in other words,

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Speaker 1: in sound what it describes. For example, for a gun

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Speaker 1: firing we say bang. It's a mapping between the sound

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Speaker 1: and the meaning that's not arbitrary. Or describing the sound

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Speaker 1: a fly makes as buzz, or describing the sound of

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Speaker 1: cat makes as hiss, And there are lots of examples

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Speaker 1: of onomatopeia, like the sound of something breaking we say crash,

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Speaker 1: or the sound of something plunking into the water, or

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Speaker 1: the sound of a clock we use TikTok, or when

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Speaker 1: we think about the sound of cat makes in English,

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Speaker 1: we say meow, or for a dog woof or a

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Speaker 1: frog ribbit. These are all examples of words that have

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Speaker 1: a phonetic relationship with the thing they describe. In other words,

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Speaker 1: they sound like it. And sometimes these relationships between sound

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Speaker 1: and meaning are even more subtle. There's something called phonus themes,

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Speaker 1: which are clusters of sound that you find in common

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Speaker 1: across related words in a language. So in English we

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Speaker 1: find the sound made by gl or ghul is associated

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Speaker 1: with light or shining. Think about words like gleam, glitter, glisten, glow,

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Speaker 1: and more loosely, words like glorious or glamorous. Across all

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Speaker 1: these words, which are cousins in meaning, you find the

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Speaker 1: same sound. So linguists are aware that sometimes there are

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Speaker 1: mappings between the way a word sounds and its meaning,

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Speaker 1: but there's not much known about the more specific relationship

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Speaker 1: between word sounds and an unusual emotional response that can

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Speaker 1: be triggered. So I got interested in this question because

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Speaker 1: something didn't escape my notice and probably not yours either,

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Speaker 1: And that's the fact that some fraction of my friends

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Speaker 1: can stand certain words. This is something that struck the

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Speaker 1: author George Saunders when he was giving a reading of

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Speaker 1: a new book he'd just published, and he was surprised

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Speaker 1: that people in the audience didn't really seem to mind

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Speaker 1: his really rough language with the cussing and the sex

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Speaker 1: scenes and so on. But two people told him that

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Speaker 1: they really hated that he used the word moist. His

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Speaker 1: cousin who was there, said it made her feel a

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Speaker 1: little physically ill when he used it. And then he

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Speaker 1: gave a reading in a different location, and his sister

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Speaker 1: was there and she said the same thing. Her reaction

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Speaker 1: wasn't to the risk a language and scenes, but to

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Speaker 1: a single word moist. Now, as it turns out, lots

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Speaker 1: of people, people you know or people you love, they

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Speaker 1: hate the word moist. It triggers a feeling of aversion

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Speaker 1: or disgust. For some people, this makes cooking shows unwatchable,

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Speaker 1: or they can't read an article about forestry and soil

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Speaker 1: or whatever. Moist is famous for being a word that

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Speaker 1: many people despise, but moist is just one word of

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Speaker 1: many consider the word tender, the word slacks, the word tissue. Now,

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Speaker 1: many of you listening don't mind these words at all,

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Speaker 1: and others are disgusted by these or consider words like

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Speaker 1: the yellow thing inside an egg, the word yoke. Some

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Speaker 1: people hate that word and many other words come up

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Speaker 1: in our studies as being unusually hated words like nourish, bulge, pulp, giggle,

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Speaker 1: fluffy nugget, or there was a guy who got interested

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Speaker 1: in astronomy but got put off by the term globular cluster.

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Speaker 1: So this phenomenon is called word aversion, and what it

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Speaker 1: involves are words that are neutral in their meaning, like

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Speaker 1: tissue or a globular cluster or whatever. There's no particular

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Speaker 1: emotional meaning to the word, but it triggers a feeling

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Speaker 1: of repugnance in some fraction of the population. My colleague

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Speaker 1: Mark Lieberman, who's a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania,

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Speaker 1: he set out to give a clear definition of word aversion.

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Speaker 1: He said, it's quote a feeling of intense, irrational distaste

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Speaker 1: for the sounder sight of a particular word or phrase,

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Speaker 1: not because its use is regarded as etymologically wrong or

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Speaker 1: logically wrong or grammatically wrong, nor because it's felt to

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Speaker 1: be overused or redundant or trendy or non standard, but

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Speaker 1: simply because the word itself somehow feels unpleasant or even disgusting.

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Speaker 1: End quote. So I want to be clear that there

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Speaker 1: are all kinds of words that you can hate for

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Speaker 1: other reasons. You might find some word snobbish or foolish,

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Speaker 1: or you might think that it's being used incorrectly. But

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Speaker 1: those are all different from word aversion, and we're not

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Speaker 1: talking about politically charged words like words that are sexually

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Speaker 1: taboo or religiously taboo, or ethnic slurs or other offensive words.

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Speaker 1: Word aversion is a different thing. And Lieberman points out

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Speaker 1: that while people say they hate words like moist, it's

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Speaker 1: not the angry kind of hate. It's more the cringe, shudder, shiver,

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Speaker 1: gives me the willies kind of hate. As an example,

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Speaker 1: one person online said, and I quote the word panties

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Speaker 1: grosses me out, and hypercorrect usage of whom annoys me.

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Speaker 1: But the feelings I get when I hear them are

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Speaker 1: two distinct sensations that I would never confuse end quote.

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Speaker 1: So the scientific mindset cares about this distinction and understanding

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Speaker 1: what is going on here, And my lab got interested

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Speaker 1: in this because we saw that word aversion provided an

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Speaker 1: inroad to study this strange and unexpected relationship between sound

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Speaker 1: and emotion. Now, before we dig in on this, I

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Speaker 1: want to fully flesh out word a version with some examples.

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Speaker 1: And there's a ton of information about word a version

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Speaker 1: spread all around online forums. So I'll just give you

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Speaker 1: some examples to enhance our intuitions about this. One woman

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Speaker 1: named Lisa posted quote, there's one word that I hate

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Speaker 1: above all others. If I come across it, I must

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Speaker 1: immediately declare my hatred of it to anyone who is

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Speaker 1: there to listen. If there's no one around, I'll resort

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Speaker 1: to primal arguing and hit the page where the word resides.

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Speaker 1: The word is hard scrabble. I don't have a logical

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Speaker 1: reason for hate this word. I haven't had a traumatic

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Speaker 1: experience with it in the past. I simply find it revolting.

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Speaker 1: It's ugly. End quote. Someone else posted luggage. Can't stand

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Speaker 1: that word luggage. It just feels gross. End quote. Someone

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Speaker 1: else says I hate the word pugilist. Another says tissue shiver.

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Speaker 1: It gives me the willies. Someone else writes, my girlfriend's

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Speaker 1: sister hates the word moist fist used together. So if

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Speaker 1: you start looking around, you'll find literally thousands of posts

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Speaker 1: and discussions about this, which, from a scientific point of view,

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Speaker 1: suggests that there's something to be understood here. Now. Quite commonly,

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Speaker 1: when you look through these forums, you see words like

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Speaker 1: moist and fleshy, and panties, but there are lots of

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Speaker 1: other words that are less expected. One woman reports, quote,

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Speaker 1: my mother hated gut, would not let us say it,

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Speaker 1: as if it were the worst word in English. End quote.

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Speaker 1: Other people online give examples like goose, pimple, or a

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Speaker 1: chunk or wedge, or meal or baffle or squab or cornucopia.

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Speaker 1: One person pointed to the word giggle and said he

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Speaker 1: hates that word quote with the concentrated hatred of a

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Speaker 1: thousand hate filled sons. End quote, fudge conduit. One person

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Speaker 1: said his aversive words were a gig motif and whimsy.

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Speaker 1: He says, quote no rational reason, just hate them unquote.

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Speaker 1: Now there are a few important clues that we need

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Speaker 1: to note here. The first thing is that not everyone

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Speaker 1: experiences word aversion. In fact, most people don't, and this

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Speaker 1: is something I'll come back to in a bit. But

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Speaker 1: of course it's hard to know what fraction of the

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Speaker 1: population has this. So about a decade ago, Mark Lieberman

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Speaker 1: decided to take a cre creative shot at gathering some data.

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Speaker 1: He noted that the problem with scraping people's online postings

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Speaker 1: about word a version was that it can't tell you

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Speaker 1: what fraction of people experience it. In other words, how

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Speaker 1: many people have word a version? Because if a commenter

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Speaker 1: writes how aversive moist is to them, you don't know

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Speaker 1: if that poster represents one out of five people or

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Speaker 1: one out of five hundred. So Lieberman had an interesting

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Speaker 1: idea to look at famous authors and see how often

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Speaker 1: they use the word moist. Now, just a side note

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Speaker 1: that this is the kind of experiment that you can

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Speaker 1: do now, but you couldn't do this twenty five years

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Speaker 1: ago because you need to analyze every word of the

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Speaker 1: entire corpus of each author, everything they've ever written. Nowadays

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Speaker 1: this seems trivial, but I just want to point out

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Speaker 1: that this kind of questioning and answering was just not

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Speaker 1: available even a generation ago. So we're living in terrific times, Okay.

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Speaker 1: So he tapped into projects Gutenberg, which was an early

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Speaker 1: project to digitize books and make them searchable, and using

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Speaker 1: that approach, which was still a little rough back in

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Speaker 1: twenty twelve. When he did this, he analyzed the complete

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Speaker 1: works of fifty authors. So this was about one hundred

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Speaker 1: and twenty five million words, with an average of about

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Speaker 1: two and a half million words per author, and he

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Speaker 1: found that on average, there were about six appearances of

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Speaker 1: the word moist per million words. Now here's the interesting part.

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Speaker 1: He found that for some authors, like Jane Austen, for instance,

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Speaker 1: there was never a single mention ever of the word moist.

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Speaker 1: If it was just a random draw, the fact that

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Speaker 1: she never ever used moist would have a probability of

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Speaker 1: happening by chance of zero point seven, in other words,

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Speaker 1: a very low probability of that happening just by chance.

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Speaker 1: On the other hand, some authors use it plenty. The

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Speaker 1: short story writer Brett Hart from the eighteen hundreds used

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Speaker 1: fifty six moists, or about twenty two times for every

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Speaker 1: million words. But compare rehtt Hart to Mark Twain, who

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Speaker 1: lived at almost exactly the same time. Mark Twain only

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Speaker 1: used the word moist two times in his entire career,

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Speaker 1: and he wrote a lot more so. Mark Twain used

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Speaker 1: only zero point five moists per million words, or forty

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Speaker 1: four times less often than Brett Hart. And by the way,

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Speaker 1: Lieberman points out that one of Twain's uses of the

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Speaker 1: word moist hardly counts because it was part of a

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Speaker 1: long made up name of an elephant, and the other

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Speaker 1: use of moist Lieberman asks with a question mark whether

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Speaker 1: that single use of the word might have been in

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Speaker 1: by an editor. In any case, this kind of literary

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Speaker 1: detective work reveals that some authors are happy to use

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Speaker 1: the word and others avoided completely in every sentence they've

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Speaker 1: ever published in their entire career. Now you might point

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Speaker 1: out that maybe these authors just wrote about different topics

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Speaker 1: and so moistness just didn't come up. So to address that,

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Speaker 1: Lieberman quantified other humidity related words like wet, damp, or

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Speaker 1: dry or arid, and he did the calculations on those,

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Speaker 1: and he found that Mark Twain used plenty of such words,

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Speaker 1: He had about half the rate of Brett Hart, even

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Speaker 1: while his use of the particular word moist was forty

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Speaker 1: four times less frequent. So by looking at someone's entire

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Speaker 1: corpus of writing, you might be able to tell something

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Speaker 1: about who hated moist and who didn't care. Now, why

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Speaker 1: is there any difference between people? Well, let's take a

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Speaker 1: quick dive version into another area that my lab is

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Speaker 1: studied for a long time, sinesthesia. These reports of word

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Speaker 1: aversion immediately grabbed my attention because in sinesthesia, as I

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Speaker 1: mentioned at the beginning, we see a cross blending of

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Speaker 1: the senses. So sounds of certain words might trigger a

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Speaker 1: color experience, or a texture or a taste, and word

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Speaker 1: aversion sounds quite a bit like that. We're talking about

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Speaker 1: sensory experiences that we usually consider as separate and distinct,

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Speaker 1: but in some people the lines between these different sensations

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Speaker 1: aren't so rigid. And so although we typically think of

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Speaker 1: synesthesia as triggering colors or sounds, there certainly seem to

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Speaker 1: be examples where any emotion is triggered, and often it's

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Speaker 1: an emotion of aversion or disgust. So something I've previously

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Speaker 1: suggested in the literature is that the sensory processing disorder

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Speaker 1: that we see in autism is actually a kind of synesthesia.

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Speaker 1: Sensory processing disorder is when you see a kid who

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Speaker 1: can't stand certain sounds it drives them nuts, like the

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Speaker 1: sound of a vacuum or the sound of a zipper

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Speaker 1: or somebody chewing or so on. So I think that

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Speaker 1: is a form of synesthesia, But instead of a region

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Speaker 1: of the brain like color getting triggered, it's regions involved

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Speaker 1: in aversion. There are a whole bunch of circuits in

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Speaker 1: the brain involved in pain and disgust or itch or whatever.

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Speaker 1: So if sensory processing disorder is a form of synesthesia,

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Speaker 1: you can see why word a version grabbed my attention.

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Speaker 1: I wondered if there might be some sinesthetic relationship here,

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Speaker 1: that a person might get this cross blending of different

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Speaker 1: senses with the sound of the word and an emotion

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Speaker 1: that that triggers. Instead of colors, one gets a feeling

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Speaker 1: instead of indigo blue, one gets the creeps. So I

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Speaker 1: got very interested in understanding what was going on here,

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Speaker 1: And the first thing I zoomed in on was that

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Speaker 1: for people with word aversion, it doesn't happen for all words,

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Speaker 1: just certain words. So how could we drill down on that?

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Speaker 1: First I found in the literature that there had been

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Speaker 1: a study on word aversion. A researcher named Paul Thibodeau

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Speaker 1: explored what he called moist aversion, and it was binary,

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Speaker 1: in other words, just based on your yes or no

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Speaker 1: answer to the question would you characterize yourself as being

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Speaker 1: particularly averse to the word moist. But we know that

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Speaker 1: word a version is much broader than moist aversion. Many

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Speaker 1: other words appear all the time in self reports of

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Speaker 1: word aversion, like tender or slax or nugget or tissue.

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Speaker 1: So Thibodeau's study was an important first step in understanding

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Speaker 1: word of version, but it left a lot unanswered. Okay,

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Speaker 1: so what were the next steps for us? If aversive

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Speaker 1: words were only words like moist, we might think it's

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Speaker 1: some reference to the meaning of the word. But something

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Speaker 1: I noticed is that people often clarified that they were

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Speaker 1: fine with alternative words or synonyms. Even if they hated

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Speaker 1: the word panties. They were fine with words like undies

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Speaker 1: and thong, just not panties. And even if they hated

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Speaker 1: the word moist, they were fine using synonyms in its place,

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Speaker 1: like damp or humid, or muggy or wet. So that

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Speaker 1: suggests it's not just about the meaning, but perhaps there

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Speaker 1: was something else going on. And with so many of

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Speaker 1: the other words that show up on these lists, it's

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Speaker 1: essentially impossible to think of any meaning, even several degrees

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Speaker 1: away that could possibly be triggering. Who has anything against

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Speaker 1: the word giggle or wedge or luggage. So one possibility

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Speaker 1: that suggested itself is that it's the sound of the word,

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Speaker 1: not just the meaning, that was the basis for the aversion.

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Speaker 1: And so we got interested in this question, and I

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Speaker 1: started looking into this with a student of mine, Hannah Bosley,

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Speaker 1: who's now a clinical psychologist in Berkeley, and we ran

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Speaker 1: a study in my lab to figure out more about

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Speaker 1: word a version. Now, what other reasons do we have

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Speaker 1: for thinking that the sound of the word has anything

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Speaker 1: to do with it. Well, first of all, it's not

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Speaker 1: uncommon to hear things from people with word a version

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Speaker 1: who point to a phonetic detail, in other words, how

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Speaker 1: the word sounds like that they hate words that contain

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Speaker 1: the sound oil or oiin. An example of this is

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Speaker 1: the word ointment, which is despised almost as much as

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Speaker 1: moist and the political writer William Safire pointed out that

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Speaker 1: the oise sound triggers an aversion in some people, and

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Speaker 1: he said he thinks this is why some people insist

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Speaker 1: on being called an attorney instead of a lawyer, or

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Speaker 1: other people hate the word shibbleth even if they don't

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Speaker 1: know what it means. Or one guy online noted that

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Speaker 1: he has word a version to any word beginning with cht,

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Speaker 1: like Cathonic or Cathonian, and he doesn't like similar words

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Speaker 1: like Cthulhu, which was a creature created by the sci

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Speaker 1: fi writer Lovecraft in nineteen twenty eight. So many, many

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Speaker 1: of the words that people find aversive seem unrelated to

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Speaker 1: the meaning and more about the sound. So we focused

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Speaker 1: in on the sound issues at play. What is the

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Speaker 1: mapping between how something sounds and the emotion it triggers.

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Speaker 1: So we tested two hundred and forty four people and

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Speaker 1: what we did is we built three lists of words

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Speaker 1: matched by the first letter and the length. The first

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Speaker 1: list was aversive words based on the most commonly reported

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Speaker 1: disliked words in online forums, so words like moist and

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Speaker 1: tender and slacks and giggle and so on. And list

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Speaker 1: number two was a list of other words generated from

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Speaker 1: a word generator that matched in length or meaning or

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Speaker 1: first letter. These were in different experiments, but these were

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Speaker 1: all neutral words that nobody found versive. And the third

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Speaker 1: list was nonsense words that had the same phoning frequency

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Speaker 1: of English, but they were totally made up, like strains

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Speaker 1: or yin's or pilp. So as an example, slacks might

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Speaker 1: be the commonly reported aversive word, and then we tested

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Speaker 1: against the word slopes which is neutral, and slent, which

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Speaker 1: is a nonsense word meaning it's a word that's just

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Speaker 1: made up. Or another example is moist and moose and

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Speaker 1: ritz or a giggle and pickle, and gampin. So we

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Speaker 1: asked participants to read words and record their feelings about

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Speaker 1: the sound of the words. So you see a word

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Speaker 1: presented on the screen from any of these categories, and

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Speaker 1: with each word you rate it on a scale from

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Speaker 1: most unpleasant to most pleasant. So what did we find.

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Speaker 1: The average rating for the aversive word group was significantly

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Speaker 1: more unpleasant than the real word controls. So we know

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Speaker 1: that a subset of the population has greater than average

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Speaker 1: version of these words, but what we had was a

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Speaker 1: random population sample. But even here we find that the

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Speaker 1: pre selected aversive words are more unpleasant on average than

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Speaker 1: the matched control words. So that suggests that there may

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Speaker 1: be something different about these aversive words like moist and slacks,

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Speaker 1: and that causes these words to be more commonly disliked.

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Speaker 1: But we also found something unexpected, which was that the

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Speaker 1: most unpleasant words for people were the nonsense words. In

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Speaker 1: other words, to our surprise, the nonsense words like gloike

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Speaker 1: and frajoians and ulvasus and pesmeri and nullogh were even

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Speaker 1: more aversive than the words that we intended to be aversive.

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Speaker 1: So what does that mean? Well, we started to examine

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Speaker 1: why we got that result, what is it about the

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Speaker 1: aversive words and the nonsense words that's getting to some people?

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Speaker 1: It presumably has something to do with the particular phonemes,

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Speaker 1: the sounds and the words, but what well. One idea

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Speaker 1: that people have suggested is that particular phonemes may inherently

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Speaker 1: connote a pleasant or unpleasant valance. For example, there was

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Speaker 1: an eighteenth century Russian poet named Mikhail Lemonzov who asserted

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Speaker 1: that tender or positive or pleasant subjects should be described

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Speaker 1: using vowels like I and e, and that unpleasant, fear

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Speaker 1: evoking subjects should be described using vowels like oh and ah.

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Speaker 1: But this isn't generally the same from language to language,

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Speaker 1: or even from person to person. And so we started

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Speaker 1: to consider the possibility that perhaps certain sounds go with

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Speaker 1: certain emotions because those sounds occur with different frequencies in

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Speaker 1: a given language. So why would it matter if some

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Speaker 1: sound is more likely to occur than another. Well, in psychology,

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Speaker 1: there's a phenomenon known as the mere exposure effect, in

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Speaker 1: which people tend to prefer familiar items or concepts over

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Speaker 1: unfamiliar ones. This is so important that I'm gonna take

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Speaker 1: a minute to talk about this. The mere exposure of

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Speaker 1: is also known as the familiarity principle, and it points

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Speaker 1: to the fact that people develop a preference or a

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Speaker 1: liking for things that they are exposed to repeatedly, even

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Speaker 1: if they were neutral to it at the beginning. The

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Speaker 1: more you encounter something, the more you tend to like it,

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Speaker 1: and this is true, by the way, whether or not

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Speaker 1: you consciously remember encountering it before. This has been shown

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Speaker 1: in a million studies. From the people we meet to

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Speaker 1: the products we encounter, familiarity breeds preference. For example, you

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Speaker 1: might find yourself gravitating towards a particular song on the

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Speaker 1: radio after you hear it a few times, or you

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Speaker 1: might feel more comfortable with someone that you've met a

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Speaker 1: few times, even if you didn't feel a strong initial connection.

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Speaker 1: The mere exposure effect highlights the brain's inclination to find

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Speaker 1: comfort in the familiar. Now. Possibly this is because repeated

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Speaker 1: exposure reduces the uncertainty or the perceived threat associated with

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Speaker 1: anything unfamiliar, so over time, this increased comfort results in

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Speaker 1: a preference or a liking. And by the way, the

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Speaker 1: way that you study this in the lab is you

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Speaker 1: show people shapes or faces or words that they haven't

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Speaker 1: seen before, and you have them rate them, and what

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Speaker 1: you find is that they tend to rate these things

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Speaker 1: more positively after being exposed to them multiple times, even

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Speaker 1: if they're not consciously aware of the exposures. And this

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Speaker 1: mere exposure effect is leveraged all the time by marketers

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Speaker 1: and advertisers who use repetition to make products more appealing.

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Speaker 1: This is why companies will pay a lot of money

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Speaker 1: to have their product appear in the background of a

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Speaker 1: television show or a movie, because that way we feel

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Speaker 1: closer to it. We warm up to things that we

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Speaker 1: encounter frequently. Now, this is issue of familiarity. It also

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Speaker 1: applies in the realm of language. If you're exposed more

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Speaker 1: to certain sounds, you come to prefer those over infrequent ones.

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Speaker 1: So we explored whether this familiarity effect holds true at

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Speaker 1: the level of sounds to explain word a version, so

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Speaker 1: we calculated the probability of certain sounds going together in

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Speaker 1: the English language. Essentially, if you look at a word,

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Speaker 1: how word like or well formed it is. So, for example,

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Speaker 1: take the word blick. It doesn't violate any sound constraints

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Speaker 1: in English. But if you have the word benick that's

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Speaker 1: less permissible because of the initial b n sound. So essentially,

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Speaker 1: the less a word sounds like other English words, the

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Speaker 1: lower its probability is. If you want to know, this

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Speaker 1: is called phonotactic probability. And by the way, if you

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00:29:58,200 --> 00:30:00,240
Speaker 1: want to read all the details of the study, I'm

429
00:30:00,280 --> 00:30:03,800
Speaker 1: linking our paper at eagleman dot com slash podcast. So

430
00:30:03,880 --> 00:30:08,680
Speaker 1: what we found is that the phonotactic probability how likely

431
00:30:09,080 --> 00:30:12,920
Speaker 1: different sounds go together. This mapped right onto what we

432
00:30:13,080 --> 00:30:17,959
Speaker 1: found for the scores. The nonsense words, which everyone hated,

433
00:30:18,280 --> 00:30:22,120
Speaker 1: had the lowest probability of existing as words. They were

434
00:30:22,160 --> 00:30:25,000
Speaker 1: the least word like in the sense of all these

435
00:30:25,040 --> 00:30:29,680
Speaker 1: sounds ending up together. Now, the aversive words like moist

436
00:30:29,800 --> 00:30:33,800
Speaker 1: and slacks and nugget had higher probabilities of those sounds

437
00:30:33,800 --> 00:30:39,640
Speaker 1: going together, but these were less probable than the control words,

438
00:30:39,680 --> 00:30:42,720
Speaker 1: the words that nobody minded. So the control words had

439
00:30:42,760 --> 00:31:03,680
Speaker 1: the highest probability of the sounds going together. So sound

440
00:31:03,800 --> 00:31:10,880
Speaker 1: groupings that were improbable mapped onto higher aversion. And then

441
00:31:10,880 --> 00:31:13,400
Speaker 1: we looked at a related measure. You can calculate what's

442
00:31:13,440 --> 00:31:17,040
Speaker 1: called the neighborhood density for any word. This just tells

443
00:31:17,080 --> 00:31:20,800
Speaker 1: you how many words differ from your word by only

444
00:31:20,880 --> 00:31:25,280
Speaker 1: one phoneme. So for instance, cat has many neighbors like

445
00:31:25,400 --> 00:31:28,400
Speaker 1: sad or bad or bat or can or cow and

446
00:31:28,480 --> 00:31:33,959
Speaker 1: so on. Or neighbors of the word urge are earth

447
00:31:34,160 --> 00:31:38,120
Speaker 1: and earl and edge and urn and age. You just

448
00:31:38,200 --> 00:31:40,240
Speaker 1: change one sound in the word and you're at some

449
00:31:40,360 --> 00:31:43,720
Speaker 1: other new word. So some words have lots of neighbors,

450
00:31:44,120 --> 00:31:49,440
Speaker 1: but others don't. And so neighborhood density measures how similar

451
00:31:49,560 --> 00:31:53,680
Speaker 1: sounding a word is to other words, and we find

452
00:31:53,720 --> 00:31:57,520
Speaker 1: the same result here. The nonsense words, on average, had

453
00:31:57,560 --> 00:32:00,880
Speaker 1: the fewest neighbors. They had the fewest words that sounded

454
00:32:00,960 --> 00:32:04,720
Speaker 1: like them, and people hated these the most. Then you

455
00:32:04,800 --> 00:32:07,960
Speaker 1: had the aversive words like moist, and they had some

456
00:32:08,280 --> 00:32:12,200
Speaker 1: more neighbors to them. And finally, the control words had

457
00:32:12,480 --> 00:32:16,680
Speaker 1: the most neighbors. So if you're a word with fewer

458
00:32:16,800 --> 00:32:21,600
Speaker 1: other words that sound like you, you are more unfamiliar.

459
00:32:21,720 --> 00:32:26,080
Speaker 1: And again this suggests that unfamiliarity plays a key part

460
00:32:26,480 --> 00:32:33,840
Speaker 1: in the experience of aversion. So words with improbable combinations

461
00:32:33,880 --> 00:32:37,680
Speaker 1: of sounds that sounded less like other English words, these

462
00:32:37,720 --> 00:32:44,120
Speaker 1: were more likely to be unpleasant. Unfamiliarity correlates with aversion.

463
00:32:45,280 --> 00:32:49,920
Speaker 1: Now just to wrap this study. I suspect that linguistic familiarity,

464
00:32:50,040 --> 00:32:53,680
Speaker 1: like we explored here, is just one important piece of

465
00:32:53,720 --> 00:32:57,200
Speaker 1: the word aversion puzzle, because there's a lot of variability

466
00:32:57,240 --> 00:33:00,920
Speaker 1: in the data that's not explained fully by familiarity. For

467
00:33:01,040 --> 00:33:04,920
Speaker 1: a full explanation, we'd almost certainly have to include the

468
00:33:04,960 --> 00:33:07,720
Speaker 1: meaning of the word as well as something about an

469
00:33:07,760 --> 00:33:12,600
Speaker 1: individual's prior experience of that particular word. So there's still

470
00:33:12,640 --> 00:33:15,640
Speaker 1: plenty to do in terms of understanding who has this

471
00:33:15,720 --> 00:33:19,680
Speaker 1: and who doesn't, and surveying speakers in other languages beyond

472
00:33:19,720 --> 00:33:23,239
Speaker 1: English to understand about their word a versions. Just as

473
00:33:23,280 --> 00:33:26,960
Speaker 1: an example, one Spanish speaker I saw said she has

474
00:33:27,000 --> 00:33:30,840
Speaker 1: a horrible aversion to words like socopar, which means to

475
00:33:30,920 --> 00:33:34,200
Speaker 1: cover up. She can't stand the word. So we can

476
00:33:34,280 --> 00:33:37,800
Speaker 1: find these same principles across languages, and we need to

477
00:33:37,880 --> 00:33:40,440
Speaker 1: understand what that tells us. And I think there are

478
00:33:40,440 --> 00:33:44,280
Speaker 1: other questions too, like is it only negative emotions? Maybe

479
00:33:44,360 --> 00:33:48,040
Speaker 1: certain words trigger really positive emotions, but maybe for some

480
00:33:48,160 --> 00:33:51,240
Speaker 1: reason that doesn't get talked about as much. And finally,

481
00:33:51,280 --> 00:33:54,120
Speaker 1: my lab and others have been searching for the genes

482
00:33:54,160 --> 00:33:58,400
Speaker 1: that underpins synesthesia and the signatures in the brain of

483
00:33:58,440 --> 00:34:01,920
Speaker 1: this crosstalk. The question is what do these look like

484
00:34:02,120 --> 00:34:05,320
Speaker 1: for word aversion? But what we can already see is

485
00:34:05,360 --> 00:34:09,360
Speaker 1: that in some people, certain sounds trigger emotions, and this

486
00:34:09,480 --> 00:34:12,560
Speaker 1: seems to be another form of synesthesia, where there's a

487
00:34:12,719 --> 00:34:17,040
Speaker 1: blending between regions of the brain that are normally a

488
00:34:17,080 --> 00:34:20,000
Speaker 1: little more separate. Now, as I noted at the beginning,

489
00:34:20,080 --> 00:34:25,480
Speaker 1: only some fraction of the population experiences word aversion, and

490
00:34:25,520 --> 00:34:28,120
Speaker 1: it's hard to estimate that percentage until you do a

491
00:34:28,480 --> 00:34:32,960
Speaker 1: careful population study, let's say, testing ten thousand people about it.

492
00:34:33,480 --> 00:34:36,160
Speaker 1: But I want to flag something important here, which is

493
00:34:36,160 --> 00:34:40,480
Speaker 1: that doing a population study, say on the internet, isn't

494
00:34:40,520 --> 00:34:44,560
Speaker 1: totally straightforward, and it has to be done carefully because

495
00:34:45,200 --> 00:34:49,919
Speaker 1: people often confuse word aversion for whatever their own pet

496
00:34:49,920 --> 00:34:52,839
Speaker 1: peeves are, like what we discussed earlier, what words they

497
00:34:52,920 --> 00:34:58,040
Speaker 1: find overused or used mistakenly, or a word that's elitist

498
00:34:58,160 --> 00:35:04,040
Speaker 1: or patronizing or whatever. Now, why might people confuse these

499
00:35:04,120 --> 00:35:08,960
Speaker 1: things with word aversion, Because, as I've discussed throughout the

500
00:35:09,000 --> 00:35:13,680
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos podcast, it's often really hard to imagine what

501
00:35:13,880 --> 00:35:17,560
Speaker 1: it is like to be in someone else's head. And

502
00:35:17,640 --> 00:35:21,279
Speaker 1: if you don't know that experience can be different for

503
00:35:21,360 --> 00:35:27,440
Speaker 1: different people. It's easy to mistakenly believe that everyone must

504
00:35:27,680 --> 00:35:31,319
Speaker 1: be having the same experience that you're having on the inside,

505
00:35:31,920 --> 00:35:36,360
Speaker 1: and so we interpret new information by shoving it into

506
00:35:36,360 --> 00:35:38,480
Speaker 1: our own model of the world, even when it doesn't

507
00:35:38,520 --> 00:35:42,520
Speaker 1: quite fit. In other words, someone tells you that they

508
00:35:42,560 --> 00:35:45,680
Speaker 1: feel a certain way, and you say, I know exactly

509
00:35:45,680 --> 00:35:48,279
Speaker 1: how you feel. Well, you may or may not. You

510
00:35:48,320 --> 00:35:52,160
Speaker 1: can only interpret their story through the lens of your

511
00:35:52,200 --> 00:35:57,200
Speaker 1: own experience. So when the study of word aversion first began,

512
00:35:57,280 --> 00:35:59,439
Speaker 1: it took a lot of effort to convince people who

513
00:35:59,440 --> 00:36:02,200
Speaker 1: didn't have word a version that this was a thing.

514
00:36:02,400 --> 00:36:06,640
Speaker 1: Why because they were interpreting the claim through only a

515
00:36:06,680 --> 00:36:10,040
Speaker 1: single perspective on the world. As an example, there was

516
00:36:10,080 --> 00:36:13,439
Speaker 1: a British guy I saw online who didn't experience word

517
00:36:13,480 --> 00:36:16,760
Speaker 1: a version, and so he asserted that this was quote

518
00:36:17,000 --> 00:36:20,719
Speaker 1: an American thing that didn't exist in British English. Well,

519
00:36:20,840 --> 00:36:24,399
Speaker 1: we now know he's incorrect about that. Many Brits have this,

520
00:36:25,080 --> 00:36:29,759
Speaker 1: but he's making the common but fundamental error of assuming

521
00:36:30,239 --> 00:36:34,640
Speaker 1: that because he doesn't experience it, British people in general

522
00:36:34,680 --> 00:36:38,520
Speaker 1: do not. And I stumbled on several comments about this online,

523
00:36:38,600 --> 00:36:41,440
Speaker 1: especially when this all started a decade ago, where people

524
00:36:41,480 --> 00:36:44,640
Speaker 1: would say things like word a version is a quote

525
00:36:45,160 --> 00:36:48,680
Speaker 1: rare and weird neurotic behavior that's being talked about by

526
00:36:48,880 --> 00:36:52,720
Speaker 1: point one percent of women. Because we know these aren't

527
00:36:52,760 --> 00:36:58,000
Speaker 1: the numbers. This is another example of our naive internal models,

528
00:36:58,040 --> 00:37:00,600
Speaker 1: where we tend to assume that if if we don't

529
00:37:00,640 --> 00:37:04,400
Speaker 1: experience something, it's because it doesn't exist and other people

530
00:37:04,400 --> 00:37:07,280
Speaker 1: are just making it up. It's just like I talked

531
00:37:07,280 --> 00:37:12,920
Speaker 1: about in other episodes about synesthesia or how we visualize things,

532
00:37:12,960 --> 00:37:15,799
Speaker 1: like some people imagine a scene like a movie and

533
00:37:15,880 --> 00:37:18,520
Speaker 1: others have no particular image at all in their heads.

534
00:37:19,280 --> 00:37:23,840
Speaker 1: Or take mental illness. For millennia, the approach to mental

535
00:37:23,880 --> 00:37:27,160
Speaker 1: illness was to say, just toughen up, or in other

536
00:37:27,239 --> 00:37:30,640
Speaker 1: cases it was we can torture you until you start

537
00:37:30,640 --> 00:37:34,800
Speaker 1: acting normally. It took literally thousands of years before people

538
00:37:34,920 --> 00:37:38,800
Speaker 1: started to realize that the experience in one person's head

539
00:37:39,320 --> 00:37:42,920
Speaker 1: can be different than the experience in their own and

540
00:37:43,080 --> 00:37:46,279
Speaker 1: what happened through history happens in the course of our

541
00:37:46,320 --> 00:37:51,359
Speaker 1: own lifetime too. A large part of your passage into

542
00:37:51,520 --> 00:37:55,360
Speaker 1: maturity is realizing that people can be quite different on

543
00:37:55,400 --> 00:38:00,120
Speaker 1: the inside and coming to override the assumption that every

544
00:38:00,120 --> 00:38:04,239
Speaker 1: one is having an experience just like yours. So, to

545
00:38:04,280 --> 00:38:08,959
Speaker 1: wrap up today's episode, reality is not one size fits all.

546
00:38:09,040 --> 00:38:11,920
Speaker 1: Two people can listen to the same words, and for

547
00:38:12,000 --> 00:38:14,840
Speaker 1: one it's aversive and for the other it's totally neutral.

548
00:38:14,880 --> 00:38:18,320
Speaker 1: It's just like eating cilantro or the feel of wool

549
00:38:18,360 --> 00:38:21,600
Speaker 1: against your skin. You can have two humans experiencing the

550
00:38:21,600 --> 00:38:26,319
Speaker 1: same event and having very different experiences. The important lesson

551
00:38:26,360 --> 00:38:28,359
Speaker 1: to keep in mind here is that if you are

552
00:38:28,800 --> 00:38:32,239
Speaker 1: only trying to understand your own reality, you're like a

553
00:38:32,600 --> 00:38:36,759
Speaker 1: fish in water trying to describe water. It's impossible to

554
00:38:36,840 --> 00:38:40,399
Speaker 1: describe what water is because you've never seen anything other

555
00:38:40,480 --> 00:38:43,680
Speaker 1: than that. But when you see a different way that

556
00:38:43,800 --> 00:38:48,600
Speaker 1: things can be, that gives you a broader platform from

557
00:38:48,600 --> 00:38:52,080
Speaker 1: which to build theories. And that's one of our deepest

558
00:38:52,120 --> 00:38:58,160
Speaker 1: goals in neuroscience, to understand how the specific microscopic activity

559
00:38:58,719 --> 00:39:03,680
Speaker 1: in your three many pounds of wet, gushy, alien computational

560
00:39:03,719 --> 00:39:08,120
Speaker 1: material maps onto the world that you see and enjoy

561
00:39:08,160 --> 00:39:12,480
Speaker 1: every day, How the unique activity in your head maps

562
00:39:12,520 --> 00:39:16,200
Speaker 1: onto the view that you're looking at right now, the

563
00:39:16,239 --> 00:39:19,279
Speaker 1: feel of your clothes on your skin, the sound of

564
00:39:19,320 --> 00:39:23,400
Speaker 1: my voice in your ear because for each of us,

565
00:39:23,960 --> 00:39:32,439
Speaker 1: reality is a little bit different. Go to Eagleman dot

566
00:39:32,440 --> 00:39:37,200
Speaker 1: com slash podcast for more reading and more information. Send

567
00:39:37,200 --> 00:39:40,040
Speaker 1: me an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com with

568
00:39:40,239 --> 00:39:43,480
Speaker 1: questions or discussion, and I'll be making an episode soon

569
00:39:43,520 --> 00:39:50,400
Speaker 1: in which i address those. Until next time, I'm David Eagleman,

570
00:39:50,560 --> 00:40:03,160
Speaker 1: signing off from the Inner Cosmos assas