Speaker 1: We all know people who hate the word moist, But
Speaker 1: why are they okay with synonyms like damp or muggy
Speaker 1: or wet. What's going on in their brains and what
Speaker 1: does this have to do with shapes or autism or synesthesia.
Speaker 1: Welcome to another episode of Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman,
Speaker 1: all about the magical three pounds of matter that constitute
Speaker 1: your reality. In today's episode, we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: a wild and relatively new example of the differences between
Speaker 1: people's internal cosmoses. We're going to talk about word aversion.
Speaker 1: Imagine that you find a tribe of people with little
Speaker 1: contact with the outside world, and they show you that
Speaker 1: they have some shapes that they draw. One of them
Speaker 1: is a round, blobby object, and another shape is a sharp,
Speaker 1: spiky star pattern. Now you figure out that one of
Speaker 1: these they call bouba and the other they call kiki.
Speaker 1: And the question I have for you is which do
Speaker 1: you think is which is the blobby thing called kiki
Speaker 1: and the starburst thing is called buba? Or would you
Speaker 1: guess it's the other way around? If you are like
Speaker 1: essentially everyone else on the planet, you guessed that the
Speaker 1: blobby object was called buba, and the sharp object was
Speaker 1: called kiki. Now, the buba kiki effect was something studied
Speaker 1: in a psychology paper a century ago, and it was
Speaker 1: a little surprising because essentially everybody gives the same answer,
Speaker 1: linking the soft sounding word with the soft looking object
Speaker 1: and vice versa. But this is surprising because in general,
Speaker 1: there's really not supposed to be a relationship between the
Speaker 1: sound of a word and what it looks like. But
Speaker 1: what this tells us is that we sometimes have relationships
Speaker 1: across the senses. And if you heard my episode on synesthesia,
Speaker 1: episode four, you'll know that a fraction of people, probably
Speaker 1: between five and ten percent, have this kind of blending
Speaker 1: of the senses in more unusual ways. For example, they
Speaker 1: might see letters and that triggers a color experience for them,
Speaker 1: where they might hear something, and that triggers a visual
Speaker 1: shape for them where they might taste something and that
Speaker 1: puts a feeling on their fingertips and so on. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm going to come back to this issue of synesthesia.
Speaker 1: That want to return to the issue of the sound
Speaker 1: of a word. So let me begin by pointing out
Speaker 1: that in general, the sound of a word has no
Speaker 1: relationship to its meaning. You can call a car an
Speaker 1: automobile or a vehicle or whatever. We don't just call
Speaker 1: it a room. So the sound that we make with
Speaker 1: our mouth car is usually quite arbitrary, and you can
Speaker 1: see this by comparing across languages, where you can call
Speaker 1: it a mahonite or che or vatur or whatever. So
Speaker 1: the sound of a word and its meaning are typically unconnected.
Speaker 1: But it's not always so simple, because sometimes we do
Speaker 1: find a strange relationship between sound and meaning. Think of
Speaker 1: on amotopeia, where a word imitates phonetically, in other words,
Speaker 1: in sound what it describes. For example, for a gun
Speaker 1: firing we say bang. It's a mapping between the sound
Speaker 1: and the meaning that's not arbitrary. Or describing the sound
Speaker 1: a fly makes as buzz, or describing the sound of
Speaker 1: cat makes as hiss, And there are lots of examples
Speaker 1: of onomatopeia, like the sound of something breaking we say crash,
Speaker 1: or the sound of something plunking into the water, or
Speaker 1: the sound of a clock we use TikTok, or when
Speaker 1: we think about the sound of cat makes in English,
Speaker 1: we say meow, or for a dog woof or a
Speaker 1: frog ribbit. These are all examples of words that have
Speaker 1: a phonetic relationship with the thing they describe. In other words,
Speaker 1: they sound like it. And sometimes these relationships between sound
Speaker 1: and meaning are even more subtle. There's something called phonus themes,
Speaker 1: which are clusters of sound that you find in common
Speaker 1: across related words in a language. So in English we
Speaker 1: find the sound made by gl or ghul is associated
Speaker 1: with light or shining. Think about words like gleam, glitter, glisten, glow,
Speaker 1: and more loosely, words like glorious or glamorous. Across all
Speaker 1: these words, which are cousins in meaning, you find the
Speaker 1: same sound. So linguists are aware that sometimes there are
Speaker 1: mappings between the way a word sounds and its meaning,
Speaker 1: but there's not much known about the more specific relationship
Speaker 1: between word sounds and an unusual emotional response that can
Speaker 1: be triggered. So I got interested in this question because
Speaker 1: something didn't escape my notice and probably not yours either,
Speaker 1: And that's the fact that some fraction of my friends
Speaker 1: can stand certain words. This is something that struck the
Speaker 1: author George Saunders when he was giving a reading of
Speaker 1: a new book he'd just published, and he was surprised
Speaker 1: that people in the audience didn't really seem to mind
Speaker 1: his really rough language with the cussing and the sex
Speaker 1: scenes and so on. But two people told him that
Speaker 1: they really hated that he used the word moist. His
Speaker 1: cousin who was there, said it made her feel a
Speaker 1: little physically ill when he used it. And then he
Speaker 1: gave a reading in a different location, and his sister
Speaker 1: was there and she said the same thing. Her reaction
Speaker 1: wasn't to the risk a language and scenes, but to
Speaker 1: a single word moist. Now, as it turns out, lots
Speaker 1: of people, people you know or people you love, they
Speaker 1: hate the word moist. It triggers a feeling of aversion
Speaker 1: or disgust. For some people, this makes cooking shows unwatchable,
Speaker 1: or they can't read an article about forestry and soil
Speaker 1: or whatever. Moist is famous for being a word that
Speaker 1: many people despise, but moist is just one word of
Speaker 1: many consider the word tender, the word slacks, the word tissue. Now,
Speaker 1: many of you listening don't mind these words at all,
Speaker 1: and others are disgusted by these or consider words like
Speaker 1: the yellow thing inside an egg, the word yoke. Some
Speaker 1: people hate that word and many other words come up
Speaker 1: in our studies as being unusually hated words like nourish, bulge, pulp, giggle,
Speaker 1: fluffy nugget, or there was a guy who got interested
Speaker 1: in astronomy but got put off by the term globular cluster.
Speaker 1: So this phenomenon is called word aversion, and what it
Speaker 1: involves are words that are neutral in their meaning, like
Speaker 1: tissue or a globular cluster or whatever. There's no particular
Speaker 1: emotional meaning to the word, but it triggers a feeling
Speaker 1: of repugnance in some fraction of the population. My colleague
Speaker 1: Mark Lieberman, who's a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania,
Speaker 1: he set out to give a clear definition of word aversion.
Speaker 1: He said, it's quote a feeling of intense, irrational distaste
Speaker 1: for the sounder sight of a particular word or phrase,
Speaker 1: not because its use is regarded as etymologically wrong or
Speaker 1: logically wrong or grammatically wrong, nor because it's felt to
Speaker 1: be overused or redundant or trendy or non standard, but
Speaker 1: simply because the word itself somehow feels unpleasant or even disgusting.
Speaker 1: End quote. So I want to be clear that there
Speaker 1: are all kinds of words that you can hate for
Speaker 1: other reasons. You might find some word snobbish or foolish,
Speaker 1: or you might think that it's being used incorrectly. But
Speaker 1: those are all different from word aversion, and we're not
Speaker 1: talking about politically charged words like words that are sexually
Speaker 1: taboo or religiously taboo, or ethnic slurs or other offensive words.
Speaker 1: Word aversion is a different thing. And Lieberman points out
Speaker 1: that while people say they hate words like moist, it's
Speaker 1: not the angry kind of hate. It's more the cringe, shudder, shiver,
Speaker 1: gives me the willies kind of hate. As an example,
Speaker 1: one person online said, and I quote the word panties
Speaker 1: grosses me out, and hypercorrect usage of whom annoys me.
Speaker 1: But the feelings I get when I hear them are
Speaker 1: two distinct sensations that I would never confuse end quote.
Speaker 1: So the scientific mindset cares about this distinction and understanding
Speaker 1: what is going on here, And my lab got interested
Speaker 1: in this because we saw that word aversion provided an
Speaker 1: inroad to study this strange and unexpected relationship between sound
Speaker 1: and emotion. Now, before we dig in on this, I
Speaker 1: want to fully flesh out word a version with some examples.
Speaker 1: And there's a ton of information about word a version
Speaker 1: spread all around online forums. So I'll just give you
Speaker 1: some examples to enhance our intuitions about this. One woman
Speaker 1: named Lisa posted quote, there's one word that I hate
Speaker 1: above all others. If I come across it, I must
Speaker 1: immediately declare my hatred of it to anyone who is
Speaker 1: there to listen. If there's no one around, I'll resort
Speaker 1: to primal arguing and hit the page where the word resides.
Speaker 1: The word is hard scrabble. I don't have a logical
Speaker 1: reason for hate this word. I haven't had a traumatic
Speaker 1: experience with it in the past. I simply find it revolting.
Speaker 1: It's ugly. End quote. Someone else posted luggage. Can't stand
Speaker 1: that word luggage. It just feels gross. End quote. Someone
Speaker 1: else says I hate the word pugilist. Another says tissue shiver.
Speaker 1: It gives me the willies. Someone else writes, my girlfriend's
Speaker 1: sister hates the word moist fist used together. So if
Speaker 1: you start looking around, you'll find literally thousands of posts
Speaker 1: and discussions about this, which, from a scientific point of view,
Speaker 1: suggests that there's something to be understood here. Now. Quite commonly,
Speaker 1: when you look through these forums, you see words like
Speaker 1: moist and fleshy, and panties, but there are lots of
Speaker 1: other words that are less expected. One woman reports, quote,
Speaker 1: my mother hated gut, would not let us say it,
Speaker 1: as if it were the worst word in English. End quote.
Speaker 1: Other people online give examples like goose, pimple, or a
Speaker 1: chunk or wedge, or meal or baffle or squab or cornucopia.
Speaker 1: One person pointed to the word giggle and said he
Speaker 1: hates that word quote with the concentrated hatred of a
Speaker 1: thousand hate filled sons. End quote, fudge conduit. One person
Speaker 1: said his aversive words were a gig motif and whimsy.
Speaker 1: He says, quote no rational reason, just hate them unquote.
Speaker 1: Now there are a few important clues that we need
Speaker 1: to note here. The first thing is that not everyone
Speaker 1: experiences word aversion. In fact, most people don't, and this
Speaker 1: is something I'll come back to in a bit. But
Speaker 1: of course it's hard to know what fraction of the
Speaker 1: population has this. So about a decade ago, Mark Lieberman
Speaker 1: decided to take a cre creative shot at gathering some data.
Speaker 1: He noted that the problem with scraping people's online postings
Speaker 1: about word a version was that it can't tell you
Speaker 1: what fraction of people experience it. In other words, how
Speaker 1: many people have word a version? Because if a commenter
Speaker 1: writes how aversive moist is to them, you don't know
Speaker 1: if that poster represents one out of five people or
Speaker 1: one out of five hundred. So Lieberman had an interesting
Speaker 1: idea to look at famous authors and see how often
Speaker 1: they use the word moist. Now, just a side note
Speaker 1: that this is the kind of experiment that you can
Speaker 1: do now, but you couldn't do this twenty five years
Speaker 1: ago because you need to analyze every word of the
Speaker 1: entire corpus of each author, everything they've ever written. Nowadays
Speaker 1: this seems trivial, but I just want to point out
Speaker 1: that this kind of questioning and answering was just not
Speaker 1: available even a generation ago. So we're living in terrific times, Okay.
Speaker 1: So he tapped into projects Gutenberg, which was an early
Speaker 1: project to digitize books and make them searchable, and using
Speaker 1: that approach, which was still a little rough back in
Speaker 1: twenty twelve. When he did this, he analyzed the complete
Speaker 1: works of fifty authors. So this was about one hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty five million words, with an average of about
Speaker 1: two and a half million words per author, and he
Speaker 1: found that on average, there were about six appearances of
Speaker 1: the word moist per million words. Now here's the interesting part.
Speaker 1: He found that for some authors, like Jane Austen, for instance,
Speaker 1: there was never a single mention ever of the word moist.
Speaker 1: If it was just a random draw, the fact that
Speaker 1: she never ever used moist would have a probability of
Speaker 1: happening by chance of zero point seven, in other words,
Speaker 1: a very low probability of that happening just by chance.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, some authors use it plenty. The
Speaker 1: short story writer Brett Hart from the eighteen hundreds used
Speaker 1: fifty six moists, or about twenty two times for every
Speaker 1: million words. But compare rehtt Hart to Mark Twain, who
Speaker 1: lived at almost exactly the same time. Mark Twain only
Speaker 1: used the word moist two times in his entire career,
Speaker 1: and he wrote a lot more so. Mark Twain used
Speaker 1: only zero point five moists per million words, or forty
Speaker 1: four times less often than Brett Hart. And by the way,
Speaker 1: Lieberman points out that one of Twain's uses of the
Speaker 1: word moist hardly counts because it was part of a
Speaker 1: long made up name of an elephant, and the other
Speaker 1: use of moist Lieberman asks with a question mark whether
Speaker 1: that single use of the word might have been in
Speaker 1: by an editor. In any case, this kind of literary
Speaker 1: detective work reveals that some authors are happy to use
Speaker 1: the word and others avoided completely in every sentence they've
Speaker 1: ever published in their entire career. Now you might point
Speaker 1: out that maybe these authors just wrote about different topics
Speaker 1: and so moistness just didn't come up. So to address that,
Speaker 1: Lieberman quantified other humidity related words like wet, damp, or
Speaker 1: dry or arid, and he did the calculations on those,
Speaker 1: and he found that Mark Twain used plenty of such words,
Speaker 1: He had about half the rate of Brett Hart, even
Speaker 1: while his use of the particular word moist was forty
Speaker 1: four times less frequent. So by looking at someone's entire
Speaker 1: corpus of writing, you might be able to tell something
Speaker 1: about who hated moist and who didn't care. Now, why
Speaker 1: is there any difference between people? Well, let's take a
Speaker 1: quick dive version into another area that my lab is
Speaker 1: studied for a long time, sinesthesia. These reports of word
Speaker 1: aversion immediately grabbed my attention because in sinesthesia, as I
Speaker 1: mentioned at the beginning, we see a cross blending of
Speaker 1: the senses. So sounds of certain words might trigger a
Speaker 1: color experience, or a texture or a taste, and word
Speaker 1: aversion sounds quite a bit like that. We're talking about
Speaker 1: sensory experiences that we usually consider as separate and distinct,
Speaker 1: but in some people the lines between these different sensations
Speaker 1: aren't so rigid. And so although we typically think of
Speaker 1: synesthesia as triggering colors or sounds, there certainly seem to
Speaker 1: be examples where any emotion is triggered, and often it's
Speaker 1: an emotion of aversion or disgust. So something I've previously
Speaker 1: suggested in the literature is that the sensory processing disorder
Speaker 1: that we see in autism is actually a kind of synesthesia.
Speaker 1: Sensory processing disorder is when you see a kid who
Speaker 1: can't stand certain sounds it drives them nuts, like the
Speaker 1: sound of a vacuum or the sound of a zipper
Speaker 1: or somebody chewing or so on. So I think that
Speaker 1: is a form of synesthesia, But instead of a region
Speaker 1: of the brain like color getting triggered, it's regions involved
Speaker 1: in aversion. There are a whole bunch of circuits in
Speaker 1: the brain involved in pain and disgust or itch or whatever.
Speaker 1: So if sensory processing disorder is a form of synesthesia,
Speaker 1: you can see why word a version grabbed my attention.
Speaker 1: I wondered if there might be some sinesthetic relationship here,
Speaker 1: that a person might get this cross blending of different
Speaker 1: senses with the sound of the word and an emotion
Speaker 1: that that triggers. Instead of colors, one gets a feeling
Speaker 1: instead of indigo blue, one gets the creeps. So I
Speaker 1: got very interested in understanding what was going on here,
Speaker 1: And the first thing I zoomed in on was that
Speaker 1: for people with word aversion, it doesn't happen for all words,
Speaker 1: just certain words. So how could we drill down on that?
Speaker 1: First I found in the literature that there had been
Speaker 1: a study on word aversion. A researcher named Paul Thibodeau
Speaker 1: explored what he called moist aversion, and it was binary,
Speaker 1: in other words, just based on your yes or no
Speaker 1: answer to the question would you characterize yourself as being
Speaker 1: particularly averse to the word moist. But we know that
Speaker 1: word a version is much broader than moist aversion. Many
Speaker 1: other words appear all the time in self reports of
Speaker 1: word aversion, like tender or slax or nugget or tissue.
Speaker 1: So Thibodeau's study was an important first step in understanding
Speaker 1: word of version, but it left a lot unanswered. Okay,
Speaker 1: so what were the next steps for us? If aversive
Speaker 1: words were only words like moist, we might think it's
Speaker 1: some reference to the meaning of the word. But something
Speaker 1: I noticed is that people often clarified that they were
Speaker 1: fine with alternative words or synonyms. Even if they hated
Speaker 1: the word panties. They were fine with words like undies
Speaker 1: and thong, just not panties. And even if they hated
Speaker 1: the word moist, they were fine using synonyms in its place,
Speaker 1: like damp or humid, or muggy or wet. So that
Speaker 1: suggests it's not just about the meaning, but perhaps there
Speaker 1: was something else going on. And with so many of
Speaker 1: the other words that show up on these lists, it's
Speaker 1: essentially impossible to think of any meaning, even several degrees
Speaker 1: away that could possibly be triggering. Who has anything against
Speaker 1: the word giggle or wedge or luggage. So one possibility
Speaker 1: that suggested itself is that it's the sound of the word,
Speaker 1: not just the meaning, that was the basis for the aversion.
Speaker 1: And so we got interested in this question, and I
Speaker 1: started looking into this with a student of mine, Hannah Bosley,
Speaker 1: who's now a clinical psychologist in Berkeley, and we ran
Speaker 1: a study in my lab to figure out more about
Speaker 1: word a version. Now, what other reasons do we have
Speaker 1: for thinking that the sound of the word has anything
Speaker 1: to do with it. Well, first of all, it's not
Speaker 1: uncommon to hear things from people with word a version
Speaker 1: who point to a phonetic detail, in other words, how
Speaker 1: the word sounds like that they hate words that contain
Speaker 1: the sound oil or oiin. An example of this is
Speaker 1: the word ointment, which is despised almost as much as
Speaker 1: moist and the political writer William Safire pointed out that
Speaker 1: the oise sound triggers an aversion in some people, and
Speaker 1: he said he thinks this is why some people insist
Speaker 1: on being called an attorney instead of a lawyer, or
Speaker 1: other people hate the word shibbleth even if they don't
Speaker 1: know what it means. Or one guy online noted that
Speaker 1: he has word a version to any word beginning with cht,
Speaker 1: like Cathonic or Cathonian, and he doesn't like similar words
Speaker 1: like Cthulhu, which was a creature created by the sci
Speaker 1: fi writer Lovecraft in nineteen twenty eight. So many, many
Speaker 1: of the words that people find aversive seem unrelated to
Speaker 1: the meaning and more about the sound. So we focused
Speaker 1: in on the sound issues at play. What is the
Speaker 1: mapping between how something sounds and the emotion it triggers.
Speaker 1: So we tested two hundred and forty four people and
Speaker 1: what we did is we built three lists of words
Speaker 1: matched by the first letter and the length. The first
Speaker 1: list was aversive words based on the most commonly reported
Speaker 1: disliked words in online forums, so words like moist and
Speaker 1: tender and slacks and giggle and so on. And list
Speaker 1: number two was a list of other words generated from
Speaker 1: a word generator that matched in length or meaning or
Speaker 1: first letter. These were in different experiments, but these were
Speaker 1: all neutral words that nobody found versive. And the third
Speaker 1: list was nonsense words that had the same phoning frequency
Speaker 1: of English, but they were totally made up, like strains
Speaker 1: or yin's or pilp. So as an example, slacks might
Speaker 1: be the commonly reported aversive word, and then we tested
Speaker 1: against the word slopes which is neutral, and slent, which
Speaker 1: is a nonsense word meaning it's a word that's just
Speaker 1: made up. Or another example is moist and moose and
Speaker 1: ritz or a giggle and pickle, and gampin. So we
Speaker 1: asked participants to read words and record their feelings about
Speaker 1: the sound of the words. So you see a word
Speaker 1: presented on the screen from any of these categories, and
Speaker 1: with each word you rate it on a scale from
Speaker 1: most unpleasant to most pleasant. So what did we find.
Speaker 1: The average rating for the aversive word group was significantly
Speaker 1: more unpleasant than the real word controls. So we know
Speaker 1: that a subset of the population has greater than average
Speaker 1: version of these words, but what we had was a
Speaker 1: random population sample. But even here we find that the
Speaker 1: pre selected aversive words are more unpleasant on average than
Speaker 1: the matched control words. So that suggests that there may
Speaker 1: be something different about these aversive words like moist and slacks,
Speaker 1: and that causes these words to be more commonly disliked.
Speaker 1: But we also found something unexpected, which was that the
Speaker 1: most unpleasant words for people were the nonsense words. In
Speaker 1: other words, to our surprise, the nonsense words like gloike
Speaker 1: and frajoians and ulvasus and pesmeri and nullogh were even
Speaker 1: more aversive than the words that we intended to be aversive.
Speaker 1: So what does that mean? Well, we started to examine
Speaker 1: why we got that result, what is it about the
Speaker 1: aversive words and the nonsense words that's getting to some people?
Speaker 1: It presumably has something to do with the particular phonemes,
Speaker 1: the sounds and the words, but what well. One idea
Speaker 1: that people have suggested is that particular phonemes may inherently
Speaker 1: connote a pleasant or unpleasant valance. For example, there was
Speaker 1: an eighteenth century Russian poet named Mikhail Lemonzov who asserted
Speaker 1: that tender or positive or pleasant subjects should be described
Speaker 1: using vowels like I and e, and that unpleasant, fear
Speaker 1: evoking subjects should be described using vowels like oh and ah.
Speaker 1: But this isn't generally the same from language to language,
Speaker 1: or even from person to person. And so we started
Speaker 1: to consider the possibility that perhaps certain sounds go with
Speaker 1: certain emotions because those sounds occur with different frequencies in
Speaker 1: a given language. So why would it matter if some
Speaker 1: sound is more likely to occur than another. Well, in psychology,
Speaker 1: there's a phenomenon known as the mere exposure effect, in
Speaker 1: which people tend to prefer familiar items or concepts over
Speaker 1: unfamiliar ones. This is so important that I'm gonna take
Speaker 1: a minute to talk about this. The mere exposure of
Speaker 1: is also known as the familiarity principle, and it points
Speaker 1: to the fact that people develop a preference or a
Speaker 1: liking for things that they are exposed to repeatedly, even
Speaker 1: if they were neutral to it at the beginning. The
Speaker 1: more you encounter something, the more you tend to like it,
Speaker 1: and this is true, by the way, whether or not
Speaker 1: you consciously remember encountering it before. This has been shown
Speaker 1: in a million studies. From the people we meet to
Speaker 1: the products we encounter, familiarity breeds preference. For example, you
Speaker 1: might find yourself gravitating towards a particular song on the
Speaker 1: radio after you hear it a few times, or you
Speaker 1: might feel more comfortable with someone that you've met a
Speaker 1: few times, even if you didn't feel a strong initial connection.
Speaker 1: The mere exposure effect highlights the brain's inclination to find
Speaker 1: comfort in the familiar. Now. Possibly this is because repeated
Speaker 1: exposure reduces the uncertainty or the perceived threat associated with
Speaker 1: anything unfamiliar, so over time, this increased comfort results in
Speaker 1: a preference or a liking. And by the way, the
Speaker 1: way that you study this in the lab is you
Speaker 1: show people shapes or faces or words that they haven't
Speaker 1: seen before, and you have them rate them, and what
Speaker 1: you find is that they tend to rate these things
Speaker 1: more positively after being exposed to them multiple times, even
Speaker 1: if they're not consciously aware of the exposures. And this
Speaker 1: mere exposure effect is leveraged all the time by marketers
Speaker 1: and advertisers who use repetition to make products more appealing.
Speaker 1: This is why companies will pay a lot of money
Speaker 1: to have their product appear in the background of a
Speaker 1: television show or a movie, because that way we feel
Speaker 1: closer to it. We warm up to things that we
Speaker 1: encounter frequently. Now, this is issue of familiarity. It also
Speaker 1: applies in the realm of language. If you're exposed more
Speaker 1: to certain sounds, you come to prefer those over infrequent ones.
Speaker 1: So we explored whether this familiarity effect holds true at
Speaker 1: the level of sounds to explain word a version, so
Speaker 1: we calculated the probability of certain sounds going together in
Speaker 1: the English language. Essentially, if you look at a word,
Speaker 1: how word like or well formed it is. So, for example,
Speaker 1: take the word blick. It doesn't violate any sound constraints
Speaker 1: in English. But if you have the word benick that's
Speaker 1: less permissible because of the initial b n sound. So essentially,
Speaker 1: the less a word sounds like other English words, the
Speaker 1: lower its probability is. If you want to know, this
Speaker 1: is called phonotactic probability. And by the way, if you
Speaker 1: want to read all the details of the study, I'm
Speaker 1: linking our paper at eagleman dot com slash podcast. So
Speaker 1: what we found is that the phonotactic probability how likely
Speaker 1: different sounds go together. This mapped right onto what we
Speaker 1: found for the scores. The nonsense words, which everyone hated,
Speaker 1: had the lowest probability of existing as words. They were
Speaker 1: the least word like in the sense of all these
Speaker 1: sounds ending up together. Now, the aversive words like moist
Speaker 1: and slacks and nugget had higher probabilities of those sounds
Speaker 1: going together, but these were less probable than the control words,
Speaker 1: the words that nobody minded. So the control words had
Speaker 1: the highest probability of the sounds going together. So sound
Speaker 1: groupings that were improbable mapped onto higher aversion. And then
Speaker 1: we looked at a related measure. You can calculate what's
Speaker 1: called the neighborhood density for any word. This just tells
Speaker 1: you how many words differ from your word by only
Speaker 1: one phoneme. So for instance, cat has many neighbors like
Speaker 1: sad or bad or bat or can or cow and
Speaker 1: so on. Or neighbors of the word urge are earth
Speaker 1: and earl and edge and urn and age. You just
Speaker 1: change one sound in the word and you're at some
Speaker 1: other new word. So some words have lots of neighbors,
Speaker 1: but others don't. And so neighborhood density measures how similar
Speaker 1: sounding a word is to other words, and we find
Speaker 1: the same result here. The nonsense words, on average, had
Speaker 1: the fewest neighbors. They had the fewest words that sounded
Speaker 1: like them, and people hated these the most. Then you
Speaker 1: had the aversive words like moist, and they had some
Speaker 1: more neighbors to them. And finally, the control words had
Speaker 1: the most neighbors. So if you're a word with fewer
Speaker 1: other words that sound like you, you are more unfamiliar.
Speaker 1: And again this suggests that unfamiliarity plays a key part
Speaker 1: in the experience of aversion. So words with improbable combinations
Speaker 1: of sounds that sounded less like other English words, these
Speaker 1: were more likely to be unpleasant. Unfamiliarity correlates with aversion.
Speaker 1: Now just to wrap this study. I suspect that linguistic familiarity,
Speaker 1: like we explored here, is just one important piece of
Speaker 1: the word aversion puzzle, because there's a lot of variability
Speaker 1: in the data that's not explained fully by familiarity. For
Speaker 1: a full explanation, we'd almost certainly have to include the
Speaker 1: meaning of the word as well as something about an
Speaker 1: individual's prior experience of that particular word. So there's still
Speaker 1: plenty to do in terms of understanding who has this
Speaker 1: and who doesn't, and surveying speakers in other languages beyond
Speaker 1: English to understand about their word a versions. Just as
Speaker 1: an example, one Spanish speaker I saw said she has
Speaker 1: a horrible aversion to words like socopar, which means to
Speaker 1: cover up. She can't stand the word. So we can
Speaker 1: find these same principles across languages, and we need to
Speaker 1: understand what that tells us. And I think there are
Speaker 1: other questions too, like is it only negative emotions? Maybe
Speaker 1: certain words trigger really positive emotions, but maybe for some
Speaker 1: reason that doesn't get talked about as much. And finally,
Speaker 1: my lab and others have been searching for the genes
Speaker 1: that underpins synesthesia and the signatures in the brain of
Speaker 1: this crosstalk. The question is what do these look like
Speaker 1: for word aversion? But what we can already see is
Speaker 1: that in some people, certain sounds trigger emotions, and this
Speaker 1: seems to be another form of synesthesia, where there's a
Speaker 1: blending between regions of the brain that are normally a
Speaker 1: little more separate. Now, as I noted at the beginning,
Speaker 1: only some fraction of the population experiences word aversion, and
Speaker 1: it's hard to estimate that percentage until you do a
Speaker 1: careful population study, let's say, testing ten thousand people about it.
Speaker 1: But I want to flag something important here, which is
Speaker 1: that doing a population study, say on the internet, isn't
Speaker 1: totally straightforward, and it has to be done carefully because
Speaker 1: people often confuse word aversion for whatever their own pet
Speaker 1: peeves are, like what we discussed earlier, what words they
Speaker 1: find overused or used mistakenly, or a word that's elitist
Speaker 1: or patronizing or whatever. Now, why might people confuse these
Speaker 1: things with word aversion, Because, as I've discussed throughout the
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos podcast, it's often really hard to imagine what
Speaker 1: it is like to be in someone else's head. And
Speaker 1: if you don't know that experience can be different for
Speaker 1: different people. It's easy to mistakenly believe that everyone must
Speaker 1: be having the same experience that you're having on the inside,
Speaker 1: and so we interpret new information by shoving it into
Speaker 1: our own model of the world, even when it doesn't
Speaker 1: quite fit. In other words, someone tells you that they
Speaker 1: feel a certain way, and you say, I know exactly
Speaker 1: how you feel. Well, you may or may not. You
Speaker 1: can only interpret their story through the lens of your
Speaker 1: own experience. So when the study of word aversion first began,
Speaker 1: it took a lot of effort to convince people who
Speaker 1: didn't have word a version that this was a thing.
Speaker 1: Why because they were interpreting the claim through only a
Speaker 1: single perspective on the world. As an example, there was
Speaker 1: a British guy I saw online who didn't experience word
Speaker 1: a version, and so he asserted that this was quote
Speaker 1: an American thing that didn't exist in British English. Well,
Speaker 1: we now know he's incorrect about that. Many Brits have this,
Speaker 1: but he's making the common but fundamental error of assuming
Speaker 1: that because he doesn't experience it, British people in general
Speaker 1: do not. And I stumbled on several comments about this online,
Speaker 1: especially when this all started a decade ago, where people
Speaker 1: would say things like word a version is a quote
Speaker 1: rare and weird neurotic behavior that's being talked about by
Speaker 1: point one percent of women. Because we know these aren't
Speaker 1: the numbers. This is another example of our naive internal models,
Speaker 1: where we tend to assume that if if we don't
Speaker 1: experience something, it's because it doesn't exist and other people
Speaker 1: are just making it up. It's just like I talked
Speaker 1: about in other episodes about synesthesia or how we visualize things,
Speaker 1: like some people imagine a scene like a movie and
Speaker 1: others have no particular image at all in their heads.
Speaker 1: Or take mental illness. For millennia, the approach to mental
Speaker 1: illness was to say, just toughen up, or in other
Speaker 1: cases it was we can torture you until you start
Speaker 1: acting normally. It took literally thousands of years before people
Speaker 1: started to realize that the experience in one person's head
Speaker 1: can be different than the experience in their own and
Speaker 1: what happened through history happens in the course of our
Speaker 1: own lifetime too. A large part of your passage into
Speaker 1: maturity is realizing that people can be quite different on
Speaker 1: the inside and coming to override the assumption that every
Speaker 1: one is having an experience just like yours. So, to
Speaker 1: wrap up today's episode, reality is not one size fits all.
Speaker 1: Two people can listen to the same words, and for
Speaker 1: one it's aversive and for the other it's totally neutral.
Speaker 1: It's just like eating cilantro or the feel of wool
Speaker 1: against your skin. You can have two humans experiencing the
Speaker 1: same event and having very different experiences. The important lesson
Speaker 1: to keep in mind here is that if you are
Speaker 1: only trying to understand your own reality, you're like a
Speaker 1: fish in water trying to describe water. It's impossible to
Speaker 1: describe what water is because you've never seen anything other
Speaker 1: than that. But when you see a different way that
Speaker 1: things can be, that gives you a broader platform from
Speaker 1: which to build theories. And that's one of our deepest
Speaker 1: goals in neuroscience, to understand how the specific microscopic activity
Speaker 1: in your three many pounds of wet, gushy, alien computational
Speaker 1: material maps onto the world that you see and enjoy
Speaker 1: every day, How the unique activity in your head maps
Speaker 1: onto the view that you're looking at right now, the
Speaker 1: feel of your clothes on your skin, the sound of
Speaker 1: my voice in your ear because for each of us,
Speaker 1: reality is a little bit different. Go to Eagleman dot
Speaker 1: com slash podcast for more reading and more information. Send
Speaker 1: me an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com with
Speaker 1: questions or discussion, and I'll be making an episode soon
Speaker 1: in which i address those. Until next time, I'm David Eagleman,
Speaker 1: signing off from the Inner Cosmos assas