WEBVTT - Ep26 "Why do people dislike moist more than moose, but not as much as merts?" 0:00:04.640 --> 0:00:08.920 We all know people who hate the word moist, But 0:00:08.960 --> 0:00:12.280 why are they okay with synonyms like damp or muggy 0:00:12.400 --> 0:00:15.640 or wet. What's going on in their brains and what 0:00:15.680 --> 0:00:23.959 does this have to do with shapes or autism or synesthesia. 0:00:24.640 --> 0:00:29.120 Welcome to another episode of Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman, 0:00:29.960 --> 0:00:35.159 all about the magical three pounds of matter that constitute 0:00:35.240 --> 0:00:49.560 your reality. In today's episode, we're going to talk about 0:00:49.920 --> 0:00:54.680 a wild and relatively new example of the differences between 0:00:54.880 --> 0:01:00.760 people's internal cosmoses. We're going to talk about word aversion. 0:01:02.080 --> 0:01:05.360 Imagine that you find a tribe of people with little 0:01:05.440 --> 0:01:08.600 contact with the outside world, and they show you that 0:01:08.680 --> 0:01:12.360 they have some shapes that they draw. One of them 0:01:12.520 --> 0:01:18.000 is a round, blobby object, and another shape is a sharp, 0:01:18.240 --> 0:01:22.320 spiky star pattern. Now you figure out that one of 0:01:22.360 --> 0:01:26.679 these they call bouba and the other they call kiki. 0:01:27.560 --> 0:01:29.800 And the question I have for you is which do 0:01:29.840 --> 0:01:33.840 you think is which is the blobby thing called kiki 0:01:34.240 --> 0:01:38.360 and the starburst thing is called buba? Or would you 0:01:38.360 --> 0:01:40.959 guess it's the other way around? If you are like 0:01:41.120 --> 0:01:44.560 essentially everyone else on the planet, you guessed that the 0:01:44.600 --> 0:01:48.520 blobby object was called buba, and the sharp object was 0:01:48.520 --> 0:01:53.720 called kiki. Now, the buba kiki effect was something studied 0:01:53.800 --> 0:01:58.080 in a psychology paper a century ago, and it was 0:01:58.200 --> 0:02:02.800 a little surprising because essentially everybody gives the same answer, 0:02:03.040 --> 0:02:06.640 linking the soft sounding word with the soft looking object 0:02:06.760 --> 0:02:12.000 and vice versa. But this is surprising because in general, 0:02:12.080 --> 0:02:16.079 there's really not supposed to be a relationship between the 0:02:16.240 --> 0:02:19.800 sound of a word and what it looks like. But 0:02:19.840 --> 0:02:23.800 what this tells us is that we sometimes have relationships 0:02:23.919 --> 0:02:28.880 across the senses. And if you heard my episode on synesthesia, 0:02:29.040 --> 0:02:33.560 episode four, you'll know that a fraction of people, probably 0:02:33.960 --> 0:02:37.760 between five and ten percent, have this kind of blending 0:02:37.919 --> 0:02:41.920 of the senses in more unusual ways. For example, they 0:02:42.000 --> 0:02:46.079 might see letters and that triggers a color experience for them, 0:02:46.360 --> 0:02:49.400 where they might hear something, and that triggers a visual 0:02:49.480 --> 0:02:52.800 shape for them where they might taste something and that 0:02:52.880 --> 0:02:56.839 puts a feeling on their fingertips and so on. Now, 0:02:56.840 --> 0:02:59.480 I'm going to come back to this issue of synesthesia. 0:03:00.200 --> 0:03:03.440 That want to return to the issue of the sound 0:03:03.840 --> 0:03:08.000 of a word. So let me begin by pointing out 0:03:08.040 --> 0:03:12.360 that in general, the sound of a word has no 0:03:12.520 --> 0:03:17.240 relationship to its meaning. You can call a car an 0:03:17.360 --> 0:03:20.919 automobile or a vehicle or whatever. We don't just call 0:03:20.960 --> 0:03:24.880 it a room. So the sound that we make with 0:03:24.960 --> 0:03:29.480 our mouth car is usually quite arbitrary, and you can 0:03:29.520 --> 0:03:32.840 see this by comparing across languages, where you can call 0:03:32.880 --> 0:03:38.920 it a mahonite or che or vatur or whatever. So 0:03:39.040 --> 0:03:43.680 the sound of a word and its meaning are typically unconnected. 0:03:44.280 --> 0:03:48.280 But it's not always so simple, because sometimes we do 0:03:48.440 --> 0:03:53.280 find a strange relationship between sound and meaning. Think of 0:03:53.800 --> 0:03:58.960 on amotopeia, where a word imitates phonetically, in other words, 0:03:59.000 --> 0:04:03.640 in sound what it describes. For example, for a gun 0:04:03.720 --> 0:04:08.040 firing we say bang. It's a mapping between the sound 0:04:08.160 --> 0:04:12.240 and the meaning that's not arbitrary. Or describing the sound 0:04:12.360 --> 0:04:16.400 a fly makes as buzz, or describing the sound of 0:04:16.480 --> 0:04:20.159 cat makes as hiss, And there are lots of examples 0:04:20.240 --> 0:04:24.480 of onomatopeia, like the sound of something breaking we say crash, 0:04:24.960 --> 0:04:29.240 or the sound of something plunking into the water, or 0:04:29.320 --> 0:04:32.800 the sound of a clock we use TikTok, or when 0:04:32.800 --> 0:04:35.160 we think about the sound of cat makes in English, 0:04:35.200 --> 0:04:38.640 we say meow, or for a dog woof or a 0:04:38.680 --> 0:04:43.000 frog ribbit. These are all examples of words that have 0:04:43.120 --> 0:04:47.160 a phonetic relationship with the thing they describe. In other words, 0:04:47.240 --> 0:04:52.520 they sound like it. And sometimes these relationships between sound 0:04:52.560 --> 0:04:57.520 and meaning are even more subtle. There's something called phonus themes, 0:04:58.120 --> 0:05:01.640 which are clusters of sound that you find in common 0:05:01.800 --> 0:05:06.000 across related words in a language. So in English we 0:05:06.120 --> 0:05:11.839 find the sound made by gl or ghul is associated 0:05:11.880 --> 0:05:20.200 with light or shining. Think about words like gleam, glitter, glisten, glow, 0:05:21.120 --> 0:05:26.320 and more loosely, words like glorious or glamorous. Across all 0:05:26.360 --> 0:05:29.400 these words, which are cousins in meaning, you find the 0:05:29.440 --> 0:05:34.160 same sound. So linguists are aware that sometimes there are 0:05:34.360 --> 0:05:37.720 mappings between the way a word sounds and its meaning, 0:05:38.480 --> 0:05:42.200 but there's not much known about the more specific relationship 0:05:42.320 --> 0:05:48.440 between word sounds and an unusual emotional response that can 0:05:48.480 --> 0:05:51.719 be triggered. So I got interested in this question because 0:05:51.720 --> 0:05:55.760 something didn't escape my notice and probably not yours either, 0:05:56.200 --> 0:05:59.320 And that's the fact that some fraction of my friends 0:05:59.760 --> 0:06:03.960 can stand certain words. This is something that struck the 0:06:04.000 --> 0:06:07.000 author George Saunders when he was giving a reading of 0:06:07.040 --> 0:06:09.960 a new book he'd just published, and he was surprised 0:06:10.080 --> 0:06:13.320 that people in the audience didn't really seem to mind 0:06:13.480 --> 0:06:16.839 his really rough language with the cussing and the sex 0:06:16.880 --> 0:06:20.719 scenes and so on. But two people told him that 0:06:20.800 --> 0:06:26.320 they really hated that he used the word moist. His 0:06:26.520 --> 0:06:28.960 cousin who was there, said it made her feel a 0:06:29.000 --> 0:06:31.719 little physically ill when he used it. And then he 0:06:31.760 --> 0:06:34.320 gave a reading in a different location, and his sister 0:06:34.440 --> 0:06:37.600 was there and she said the same thing. Her reaction 0:06:37.960 --> 0:06:41.400 wasn't to the risk a language and scenes, but to 0:06:41.480 --> 0:06:46.440 a single word moist. Now, as it turns out, lots 0:06:46.480 --> 0:06:50.039 of people, people you know or people you love, they 0:06:50.160 --> 0:06:54.200 hate the word moist. It triggers a feeling of aversion 0:06:54.320 --> 0:06:59.159 or disgust. For some people, this makes cooking shows unwatchable, 0:06:59.440 --> 0:07:03.080 or they can't read an article about forestry and soil 0:07:03.279 --> 0:07:07.400 or whatever. Moist is famous for being a word that 0:07:07.560 --> 0:07:13.200 many people despise, but moist is just one word of 0:07:13.320 --> 0:07:20.400 many consider the word tender, the word slacks, the word tissue. Now, 0:07:20.400 --> 0:07:22.480 many of you listening don't mind these words at all, 0:07:22.760 --> 0:07:26.520 and others are disgusted by these or consider words like 0:07:26.600 --> 0:07:30.320 the yellow thing inside an egg, the word yoke. Some 0:07:30.400 --> 0:07:33.920 people hate that word and many other words come up 0:07:33.960 --> 0:07:43.240 in our studies as being unusually hated words like nourish, bulge, pulp, giggle, 0:07:44.240 --> 0:07:48.680 fluffy nugget, or there was a guy who got interested 0:07:48.880 --> 0:07:53.880 in astronomy but got put off by the term globular cluster. 0:07:55.080 --> 0:07:59.440 So this phenomenon is called word aversion, and what it 0:07:59.480 --> 0:08:02.720 involves are words that are neutral in their meaning, like 0:08:03.000 --> 0:08:06.400 tissue or a globular cluster or whatever. There's no particular 0:08:06.800 --> 0:08:10.440 emotional meaning to the word, but it triggers a feeling 0:08:10.480 --> 0:08:16.080 of repugnance in some fraction of the population. My colleague 0:08:16.080 --> 0:08:19.520 Mark Lieberman, who's a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, 0:08:19.600 --> 0:08:23.480 he set out to give a clear definition of word aversion. 0:08:23.800 --> 0:08:29.200 He said, it's quote a feeling of intense, irrational distaste 0:08:29.600 --> 0:08:32.840 for the sounder sight of a particular word or phrase, 0:08:33.360 --> 0:08:37.960 not because its use is regarded as etymologically wrong or 0:08:38.040 --> 0:08:42.440 logically wrong or grammatically wrong, nor because it's felt to 0:08:42.480 --> 0:08:46.840 be overused or redundant or trendy or non standard, but 0:08:47.120 --> 0:08:53.400 simply because the word itself somehow feels unpleasant or even disgusting. 0:08:53.960 --> 0:08:56.880 End quote. So I want to be clear that there 0:08:56.880 --> 0:08:59.040 are all kinds of words that you can hate for 0:08:59.120 --> 0:09:03.720 other reasons. You might find some word snobbish or foolish, 0:09:03.840 --> 0:09:06.720 or you might think that it's being used incorrectly. But 0:09:06.800 --> 0:09:10.520 those are all different from word aversion, and we're not 0:09:10.600 --> 0:09:15.079 talking about politically charged words like words that are sexually 0:09:15.120 --> 0:09:21.000 taboo or religiously taboo, or ethnic slurs or other offensive words. 0:09:21.800 --> 0:09:26.040 Word aversion is a different thing. And Lieberman points out 0:09:26.080 --> 0:09:29.320 that while people say they hate words like moist, it's 0:09:29.360 --> 0:09:35.400 not the angry kind of hate. It's more the cringe, shudder, shiver, 0:09:36.160 --> 0:09:39.960 gives me the willies kind of hate. As an example, 0:09:40.480 --> 0:09:44.920 one person online said, and I quote the word panties 0:09:45.440 --> 0:09:50.600 grosses me out, and hypercorrect usage of whom annoys me. 0:09:51.240 --> 0:09:53.480 But the feelings I get when I hear them are 0:09:53.520 --> 0:09:57.920 two distinct sensations that I would never confuse end quote. 0:09:59.000 --> 0:10:04.240 So the scientific mindset cares about this distinction and understanding 0:10:04.320 --> 0:10:07.280 what is going on here, And my lab got interested 0:10:07.320 --> 0:10:11.840 in this because we saw that word aversion provided an 0:10:11.920 --> 0:10:17.440 inroad to study this strange and unexpected relationship between sound 0:10:17.640 --> 0:10:20.640 and emotion. Now, before we dig in on this, I 0:10:20.679 --> 0:10:25.280 want to fully flesh out word a version with some examples. 0:10:25.559 --> 0:10:28.000 And there's a ton of information about word a version 0:10:28.080 --> 0:10:31.200 spread all around online forums. So I'll just give you 0:10:31.200 --> 0:10:36.679 some examples to enhance our intuitions about this. One woman 0:10:36.800 --> 0:10:41.480 named Lisa posted quote, there's one word that I hate 0:10:41.520 --> 0:10:44.360 above all others. If I come across it, I must 0:10:44.440 --> 0:10:47.400 immediately declare my hatred of it to anyone who is 0:10:47.440 --> 0:10:50.240 there to listen. If there's no one around, I'll resort 0:10:50.280 --> 0:10:54.439 to primal arguing and hit the page where the word resides. 0:10:54.960 --> 0:10:59.199 The word is hard scrabble. I don't have a logical 0:10:59.240 --> 0:11:02.360 reason for hate this word. I haven't had a traumatic 0:11:02.480 --> 0:11:06.160 experience with it in the past. I simply find it revolting. 0:11:06.559 --> 0:11:12.320 It's ugly. End quote. Someone else posted luggage. Can't stand 0:11:12.360 --> 0:11:16.600 that word luggage. It just feels gross. End quote. Someone 0:11:16.679 --> 0:11:22.880 else says I hate the word pugilist. Another says tissue shiver. 0:11:23.160 --> 0:11:27.800 It gives me the willies. Someone else writes, my girlfriend's 0:11:27.800 --> 0:11:32.679 sister hates the word moist fist used together. So if 0:11:32.720 --> 0:11:36.359 you start looking around, you'll find literally thousands of posts 0:11:36.400 --> 0:11:39.920 and discussions about this, which, from a scientific point of view, 0:11:40.000 --> 0:11:44.680 suggests that there's something to be understood here. Now. Quite commonly, 0:11:44.720 --> 0:11:47.280 when you look through these forums, you see words like 0:11:47.440 --> 0:11:51.440 moist and fleshy, and panties, but there are lots of 0:11:51.480 --> 0:11:55.920 other words that are less expected. One woman reports, quote, 0:11:55.920 --> 0:11:59.160 my mother hated gut, would not let us say it, 0:11:59.360 --> 0:12:02.479 as if it were the worst word in English. End quote. 0:12:02.600 --> 0:12:05.959 Other people online give examples like goose, pimple, or a 0:12:06.120 --> 0:12:13.840 chunk or wedge, or meal or baffle or squab or cornucopia. 0:12:13.960 --> 0:12:17.200 One person pointed to the word giggle and said he 0:12:17.360 --> 0:12:21.400 hates that word quote with the concentrated hatred of a 0:12:21.520 --> 0:12:26.600 thousand hate filled sons. End quote, fudge conduit. One person 0:12:26.640 --> 0:12:31.040 said his aversive words were a gig motif and whimsy. 0:12:32.080 --> 0:12:38.400 He says, quote no rational reason, just hate them unquote. 0:12:38.720 --> 0:12:41.319 Now there are a few important clues that we need 0:12:41.360 --> 0:12:44.920 to note here. The first thing is that not everyone 0:12:45.120 --> 0:12:48.319 experiences word aversion. In fact, most people don't, and this 0:12:48.360 --> 0:12:50.640 is something I'll come back to in a bit. But 0:12:50.679 --> 0:12:53.800 of course it's hard to know what fraction of the 0:12:53.840 --> 0:12:58.280 population has this. So about a decade ago, Mark Lieberman 0:12:58.360 --> 0:13:02.240 decided to take a cre creative shot at gathering some data. 0:13:02.960 --> 0:13:07.160 He noted that the problem with scraping people's online postings 0:13:07.160 --> 0:13:10.280 about word a version was that it can't tell you 0:13:10.320 --> 0:13:13.719 what fraction of people experience it. In other words, how 0:13:13.720 --> 0:13:17.880 many people have word a version? Because if a commenter 0:13:18.360 --> 0:13:21.640 writes how aversive moist is to them, you don't know 0:13:21.679 --> 0:13:25.240 if that poster represents one out of five people or 0:13:25.320 --> 0:13:28.800 one out of five hundred. So Lieberman had an interesting 0:13:28.960 --> 0:13:33.680 idea to look at famous authors and see how often 0:13:33.720 --> 0:13:37.559 they use the word moist. Now, just a side note 0:13:37.559 --> 0:13:39.720 that this is the kind of experiment that you can 0:13:39.840 --> 0:13:42.360 do now, but you couldn't do this twenty five years 0:13:42.360 --> 0:13:46.240 ago because you need to analyze every word of the 0:13:46.440 --> 0:13:51.920 entire corpus of each author, everything they've ever written. Nowadays 0:13:51.960 --> 0:13:54.040 this seems trivial, but I just want to point out 0:13:54.040 --> 0:13:57.720 that this kind of questioning and answering was just not 0:13:57.960 --> 0:14:03.440 available even a generation ago. So we're living in terrific times, Okay. 0:14:03.480 --> 0:14:07.240 So he tapped into projects Gutenberg, which was an early 0:14:07.360 --> 0:14:11.839 project to digitize books and make them searchable, and using 0:14:11.880 --> 0:14:14.840 that approach, which was still a little rough back in 0:14:14.840 --> 0:14:18.839 twenty twelve. When he did this, he analyzed the complete 0:14:19.000 --> 0:14:23.080 works of fifty authors. So this was about one hundred 0:14:23.080 --> 0:14:26.440 and twenty five million words, with an average of about 0:14:26.760 --> 0:14:29.960 two and a half million words per author, and he 0:14:30.040 --> 0:14:34.960 found that on average, there were about six appearances of 0:14:35.000 --> 0:14:39.280 the word moist per million words. Now here's the interesting part. 0:14:39.760 --> 0:14:44.080 He found that for some authors, like Jane Austen, for instance, 0:14:44.560 --> 0:14:49.000 there was never a single mention ever of the word moist. 0:14:49.560 --> 0:14:51.920 If it was just a random draw, the fact that 0:14:51.960 --> 0:14:55.800 she never ever used moist would have a probability of 0:14:55.960 --> 0:15:00.200 happening by chance of zero point seven, in other words, 0:15:00.200 --> 0:15:04.000 a very low probability of that happening just by chance. 0:15:04.800 --> 0:15:08.680 On the other hand, some authors use it plenty. The 0:15:09.040 --> 0:15:12.880 short story writer Brett Hart from the eighteen hundreds used 0:15:13.320 --> 0:15:17.440 fifty six moists, or about twenty two times for every 0:15:17.440 --> 0:15:22.520 million words. But compare rehtt Hart to Mark Twain, who 0:15:22.600 --> 0:15:26.480 lived at almost exactly the same time. Mark Twain only 0:15:26.560 --> 0:15:29.960 used the word moist two times in his entire career, 0:15:30.000 --> 0:15:34.320 and he wrote a lot more so. Mark Twain used 0:15:34.400 --> 0:15:39.120 only zero point five moists per million words, or forty 0:15:39.160 --> 0:15:43.560 four times less often than Brett Hart. And by the way, 0:15:43.640 --> 0:15:46.840 Lieberman points out that one of Twain's uses of the 0:15:46.840 --> 0:15:49.720 word moist hardly counts because it was part of a 0:15:49.760 --> 0:15:53.600 long made up name of an elephant, and the other 0:15:53.800 --> 0:15:57.320 use of moist Lieberman asks with a question mark whether 0:15:57.400 --> 0:15:59.760 that single use of the word might have been in 0:16:00.360 --> 0:16:04.520 by an editor. In any case, this kind of literary 0:16:04.600 --> 0:16:08.360 detective work reveals that some authors are happy to use 0:16:08.400 --> 0:16:12.160 the word and others avoided completely in every sentence they've 0:16:12.160 --> 0:16:15.880 ever published in their entire career. Now you might point 0:16:15.880 --> 0:16:19.440 out that maybe these authors just wrote about different topics 0:16:19.480 --> 0:16:23.240 and so moistness just didn't come up. So to address that, 0:16:23.720 --> 0:16:29.240 Lieberman quantified other humidity related words like wet, damp, or 0:16:29.360 --> 0:16:32.520 dry or arid, and he did the calculations on those, 0:16:32.960 --> 0:16:36.720 and he found that Mark Twain used plenty of such words, 0:16:36.960 --> 0:16:39.880 He had about half the rate of Brett Hart, even 0:16:39.920 --> 0:16:43.440 while his use of the particular word moist was forty 0:16:43.440 --> 0:16:48.400 four times less frequent. So by looking at someone's entire 0:16:48.480 --> 0:16:51.280 corpus of writing, you might be able to tell something 0:16:51.680 --> 0:16:55.600 about who hated moist and who didn't care. Now, why 0:16:55.640 --> 0:16:59.520 is there any difference between people? Well, let's take a 0:16:59.560 --> 0:17:02.680 quick dive version into another area that my lab is 0:17:02.680 --> 0:17:07.399 studied for a long time, sinesthesia. These reports of word 0:17:07.560 --> 0:17:12.040 aversion immediately grabbed my attention because in sinesthesia, as I 0:17:12.119 --> 0:17:15.520 mentioned at the beginning, we see a cross blending of 0:17:15.560 --> 0:17:18.879 the senses. So sounds of certain words might trigger a 0:17:18.960 --> 0:17:22.240 color experience, or a texture or a taste, and word 0:17:22.240 --> 0:17:25.600 aversion sounds quite a bit like that. We're talking about 0:17:26.240 --> 0:17:31.320 sensory experiences that we usually consider as separate and distinct, 0:17:31.440 --> 0:17:36.120 but in some people the lines between these different sensations 0:17:36.160 --> 0:17:39.719 aren't so rigid. And so although we typically think of 0:17:39.760 --> 0:17:44.679 synesthesia as triggering colors or sounds, there certainly seem to 0:17:44.680 --> 0:17:48.080 be examples where any emotion is triggered, and often it's 0:17:48.119 --> 0:17:53.280 an emotion of aversion or disgust. So something I've previously 0:17:53.359 --> 0:17:58.040 suggested in the literature is that the sensory processing disorder 0:17:58.359 --> 0:18:02.359 that we see in autism is actually a kind of synesthesia. 0:18:02.960 --> 0:18:06.400 Sensory processing disorder is when you see a kid who 0:18:06.480 --> 0:18:10.480 can't stand certain sounds it drives them nuts, like the 0:18:10.560 --> 0:18:12.840 sound of a vacuum or the sound of a zipper 0:18:13.280 --> 0:18:16.320 or somebody chewing or so on. So I think that 0:18:16.480 --> 0:18:19.760 is a form of synesthesia, But instead of a region 0:18:19.840 --> 0:18:24.040 of the brain like color getting triggered, it's regions involved 0:18:24.080 --> 0:18:27.159 in aversion. There are a whole bunch of circuits in 0:18:27.200 --> 0:18:30.320 the brain involved in pain and disgust or itch or whatever. 0:18:31.040 --> 0:18:34.879 So if sensory processing disorder is a form of synesthesia, 0:18:35.359 --> 0:18:38.680 you can see why word a version grabbed my attention. 0:18:39.280 --> 0:18:43.160 I wondered if there might be some sinesthetic relationship here, 0:18:43.720 --> 0:18:46.919 that a person might get this cross blending of different 0:18:46.960 --> 0:18:51.119 senses with the sound of the word and an emotion 0:18:51.960 --> 0:18:56.920 that that triggers. Instead of colors, one gets a feeling 0:18:57.920 --> 0:19:17.639 instead of indigo blue, one gets the creeps. So I 0:19:17.640 --> 0:19:20.320 got very interested in understanding what was going on here, 0:19:20.800 --> 0:19:23.000 And the first thing I zoomed in on was that 0:19:23.040 --> 0:19:26.720 for people with word aversion, it doesn't happen for all words, 0:19:26.880 --> 0:19:30.160 just certain words. So how could we drill down on that? 0:19:31.200 --> 0:19:33.439 First I found in the literature that there had been 0:19:33.480 --> 0:19:37.680 a study on word aversion. A researcher named Paul Thibodeau 0:19:38.400 --> 0:19:42.760 explored what he called moist aversion, and it was binary, 0:19:42.840 --> 0:19:45.159 in other words, just based on your yes or no 0:19:45.480 --> 0:19:48.960 answer to the question would you characterize yourself as being 0:19:49.000 --> 0:19:53.840 particularly averse to the word moist. But we know that 0:19:53.960 --> 0:19:58.760 word a version is much broader than moist aversion. Many 0:19:58.840 --> 0:20:02.439 other words appear all the time in self reports of 0:20:02.520 --> 0:20:06.960 word aversion, like tender or slax or nugget or tissue. 0:20:07.920 --> 0:20:11.720 So Thibodeau's study was an important first step in understanding 0:20:11.720 --> 0:20:15.040 word of version, but it left a lot unanswered. Okay, 0:20:15.080 --> 0:20:17.879 so what were the next steps for us? If aversive 0:20:18.000 --> 0:20:20.880 words were only words like moist, we might think it's 0:20:20.920 --> 0:20:24.560 some reference to the meaning of the word. But something 0:20:24.600 --> 0:20:27.320 I noticed is that people often clarified that they were 0:20:27.440 --> 0:20:31.879 fine with alternative words or synonyms. Even if they hated 0:20:31.920 --> 0:20:35.920 the word panties. They were fine with words like undies 0:20:35.960 --> 0:20:39.720 and thong, just not panties. And even if they hated 0:20:39.720 --> 0:20:43.879 the word moist, they were fine using synonyms in its place, 0:20:44.040 --> 0:20:48.320 like damp or humid, or muggy or wet. So that 0:20:48.400 --> 0:20:52.560 suggests it's not just about the meaning, but perhaps there 0:20:52.640 --> 0:20:55.359 was something else going on. And with so many of 0:20:55.400 --> 0:20:58.040 the other words that show up on these lists, it's 0:20:58.240 --> 0:21:03.040 essentially impossible to think of any meaning, even several degrees 0:21:03.080 --> 0:21:07.040 away that could possibly be triggering. Who has anything against 0:21:07.080 --> 0:21:13.919 the word giggle or wedge or luggage. So one possibility 0:21:13.920 --> 0:21:17.760 that suggested itself is that it's the sound of the word, 0:21:17.840 --> 0:21:21.600 not just the meaning, that was the basis for the aversion. 0:21:22.040 --> 0:21:24.240 And so we got interested in this question, and I 0:21:24.280 --> 0:21:27.760 started looking into this with a student of mine, Hannah Bosley, 0:21:27.760 --> 0:21:31.120 who's now a clinical psychologist in Berkeley, and we ran 0:21:31.160 --> 0:21:34.240 a study in my lab to figure out more about 0:21:34.400 --> 0:21:37.680 word a version. Now, what other reasons do we have 0:21:37.760 --> 0:21:40.679 for thinking that the sound of the word has anything 0:21:40.720 --> 0:21:42.840 to do with it. Well, first of all, it's not 0:21:43.119 --> 0:21:46.560 uncommon to hear things from people with word a version 0:21:46.920 --> 0:21:50.400 who point to a phonetic detail, in other words, how 0:21:50.520 --> 0:21:54.320 the word sounds like that they hate words that contain 0:21:54.400 --> 0:21:58.119 the sound oil or oiin. An example of this is 0:21:58.160 --> 0:22:01.920 the word ointment, which is despised almost as much as 0:22:02.000 --> 0:22:06.000 moist and the political writer William Safire pointed out that 0:22:06.080 --> 0:22:09.720 the oise sound triggers an aversion in some people, and 0:22:09.760 --> 0:22:12.920 he said he thinks this is why some people insist 0:22:12.960 --> 0:22:17.800 on being called an attorney instead of a lawyer, or 0:22:17.840 --> 0:22:21.040 other people hate the word shibbleth even if they don't 0:22:21.040 --> 0:22:24.560 know what it means. Or one guy online noted that 0:22:24.760 --> 0:22:29.160 he has word a version to any word beginning with cht, 0:22:29.200 --> 0:22:33.040 like Cathonic or Cathonian, and he doesn't like similar words 0:22:33.080 --> 0:22:36.200 like Cthulhu, which was a creature created by the sci 0:22:36.280 --> 0:22:40.440 fi writer Lovecraft in nineteen twenty eight. So many, many 0:22:40.480 --> 0:22:44.280 of the words that people find aversive seem unrelated to 0:22:44.320 --> 0:22:49.280 the meaning and more about the sound. So we focused 0:22:49.280 --> 0:22:52.120 in on the sound issues at play. What is the 0:22:52.160 --> 0:22:55.400 mapping between how something sounds and the emotion it triggers. 0:22:55.840 --> 0:22:58.480 So we tested two hundred and forty four people and 0:22:58.560 --> 0:23:02.560 what we did is we built three lists of words 0:23:02.600 --> 0:23:06.480 matched by the first letter and the length. The first 0:23:06.600 --> 0:23:11.879 list was aversive words based on the most commonly reported 0:23:12.440 --> 0:23:16.040 disliked words in online forums, so words like moist and 0:23:16.119 --> 0:23:19.160 tender and slacks and giggle and so on. And list 0:23:19.240 --> 0:23:22.520 number two was a list of other words generated from 0:23:22.520 --> 0:23:26.399 a word generator that matched in length or meaning or 0:23:26.520 --> 0:23:29.920 first letter. These were in different experiments, but these were 0:23:29.960 --> 0:23:33.840 all neutral words that nobody found versive. And the third 0:23:33.880 --> 0:23:39.120 list was nonsense words that had the same phoning frequency 0:23:39.280 --> 0:23:42.520 of English, but they were totally made up, like strains 0:23:42.880 --> 0:23:47.240 or yin's or pilp. So as an example, slacks might 0:23:47.280 --> 0:23:50.760 be the commonly reported aversive word, and then we tested 0:23:50.760 --> 0:23:55.240 against the word slopes which is neutral, and slent, which 0:23:55.280 --> 0:23:57.720 is a nonsense word meaning it's a word that's just 0:23:57.840 --> 0:24:03.080 made up. Or another example is moist and moose and 0:24:03.720 --> 0:24:08.920 ritz or a giggle and pickle, and gampin. So we 0:24:09.040 --> 0:24:13.520 asked participants to read words and record their feelings about 0:24:13.560 --> 0:24:16.160 the sound of the words. So you see a word 0:24:16.200 --> 0:24:19.639 presented on the screen from any of these categories, and 0:24:19.760 --> 0:24:22.320 with each word you rate it on a scale from 0:24:22.720 --> 0:24:26.840 most unpleasant to most pleasant. So what did we find. 0:24:27.359 --> 0:24:32.639 The average rating for the aversive word group was significantly 0:24:32.800 --> 0:24:37.679 more unpleasant than the real word controls. So we know 0:24:37.760 --> 0:24:41.520 that a subset of the population has greater than average 0:24:41.640 --> 0:24:43.879 version of these words, but what we had was a 0:24:43.960 --> 0:24:47.919 random population sample. But even here we find that the 0:24:48.040 --> 0:24:52.080 pre selected aversive words are more unpleasant on average than 0:24:52.119 --> 0:24:55.720 the matched control words. So that suggests that there may 0:24:55.760 --> 0:24:59.600 be something different about these aversive words like moist and slacks, 0:24:59.640 --> 0:25:04.159 and that causes these words to be more commonly disliked. 0:25:04.840 --> 0:25:08.400 But we also found something unexpected, which was that the 0:25:08.440 --> 0:25:12.800 most unpleasant words for people were the nonsense words. In 0:25:12.840 --> 0:25:18.280 other words, to our surprise, the nonsense words like gloike 0:25:18.560 --> 0:25:24.400 and frajoians and ulvasus and pesmeri and nullogh were even 0:25:24.520 --> 0:25:27.920 more aversive than the words that we intended to be aversive. 0:25:28.480 --> 0:25:31.840 So what does that mean? Well, we started to examine 0:25:31.880 --> 0:25:34.800 why we got that result, what is it about the 0:25:34.840 --> 0:25:39.080 aversive words and the nonsense words that's getting to some people? 0:25:39.760 --> 0:25:43.680 It presumably has something to do with the particular phonemes, 0:25:43.760 --> 0:25:48.160 the sounds and the words, but what well. One idea 0:25:48.200 --> 0:25:53.200 that people have suggested is that particular phonemes may inherently 0:25:53.840 --> 0:25:58.000 connote a pleasant or unpleasant valance. For example, there was 0:25:58.040 --> 0:26:02.560 an eighteenth century Russian poet named Mikhail Lemonzov who asserted 0:26:02.600 --> 0:26:07.760 that tender or positive or pleasant subjects should be described 0:26:07.880 --> 0:26:12.800 using vowels like I and e, and that unpleasant, fear 0:26:12.840 --> 0:26:17.960 evoking subjects should be described using vowels like oh and ah. 0:26:18.359 --> 0:26:21.360 But this isn't generally the same from language to language, 0:26:21.440 --> 0:26:23.800 or even from person to person. And so we started 0:26:23.800 --> 0:26:28.280 to consider the possibility that perhaps certain sounds go with 0:26:28.320 --> 0:26:34.479 certain emotions because those sounds occur with different frequencies in 0:26:34.520 --> 0:26:37.480 a given language. So why would it matter if some 0:26:37.640 --> 0:26:43.480 sound is more likely to occur than another. Well, in psychology, 0:26:43.520 --> 0:26:48.320 there's a phenomenon known as the mere exposure effect, in 0:26:48.359 --> 0:26:53.240 which people tend to prefer familiar items or concepts over 0:26:53.600 --> 0:26:56.680 unfamiliar ones. This is so important that I'm gonna take 0:26:56.720 --> 0:26:59.800 a minute to talk about this. The mere exposure of 0:27:00.359 --> 0:27:04.280 is also known as the familiarity principle, and it points 0:27:04.280 --> 0:27:08.080 to the fact that people develop a preference or a 0:27:08.160 --> 0:27:12.840 liking for things that they are exposed to repeatedly, even 0:27:12.840 --> 0:27:15.520 if they were neutral to it at the beginning. The 0:27:15.520 --> 0:27:18.719 more you encounter something, the more you tend to like it, 0:27:18.960 --> 0:27:21.600 and this is true, by the way, whether or not 0:27:21.800 --> 0:27:25.960 you consciously remember encountering it before. This has been shown 0:27:26.000 --> 0:27:28.919 in a million studies. From the people we meet to 0:27:28.960 --> 0:27:34.760 the products we encounter, familiarity breeds preference. For example, you 0:27:34.800 --> 0:27:38.800 might find yourself gravitating towards a particular song on the 0:27:38.920 --> 0:27:41.960 radio after you hear it a few times, or you 0:27:42.040 --> 0:27:45.040 might feel more comfortable with someone that you've met a 0:27:45.040 --> 0:27:48.240 few times, even if you didn't feel a strong initial connection. 0:27:49.080 --> 0:27:54.520 The mere exposure effect highlights the brain's inclination to find 0:27:54.720 --> 0:27:59.440 comfort in the familiar. Now. Possibly this is because repeated 0:27:59.520 --> 0:28:05.720 exposure reduces the uncertainty or the perceived threat associated with 0:28:05.800 --> 0:28:10.840 anything unfamiliar, so over time, this increased comfort results in 0:28:10.880 --> 0:28:14.399