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The Science of Swearing

2/11/2017

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by Carolyn Abel
With a constant influx of upsetting , and yes, downright terrifying news about “alternative facts,” executive orders, and Donald Trump’s cabinet, you may have found yourself using more choice expletives than usual.

I mean, I’m still wondering: “What the hell are alternative facts?!”

​But don’t worry; this story isn’t about politics.


On a lighter note, remember back in middle school sex-ed when you had to come up with as many terms as you could for parts of sexual anatomy? How many words for sex can you think of now? (How about different forms of the f word?)

So where did they come from and how did we evolve to use swearwords the way we do today?
A brief history of such words tells us that, contrary to popular belief, many four-letter words were not particularly vile, even ordinary. I bet you didn’t know that ‘fuck’ appeared in a legal document in 1310, or that ‘cunt’ showed up in a 14th century surgery textbook. Actually, it wasn’t until after the Renaissance that taboo words went from having religious connotations  to sexual ones (It’s pretty clear that ‘fuck’ had sexual connotations though, even in 1310).

As it turns out, there’s quite a bit of neurological research dealing with how we use profanity. Various studies in which researchers explored  patients with brain damage demonstrate  that these subjects  had a rather unique handle on language. The researchers noted that they used swear words heavily, even when they were  otherwise non-verbal. This suggests that the brain encodes profanity differently from other language. Additionally, neutral words are processed in the cerebral cortex, which matures later in development and is associated with higher functions, whereas profanity is associated with emotions and the limbic system.

Tourette’s syndrome and aphasia (the inability to understand and produce language)  can also give us insight into brain structures involved in swearing. As the basal ganglia is normally involved in the inhibition of inappropriate behaviors, deficits in this structure are likely implicated in Tourette’s. On the other hand, aphasias tend to affect the left hemisphere of the brain (the area responsible for language production in most people) and thus result in the inability to initiate regular speech.

Another unique characteristic of profanities are their linguistics. There’s a reason that most of them are four-letter, one-syllable words, ending in a consonant. This sharper quality contributes to the benefits of these words, especially in the context of pain response. Many similar studies have been done exploring pain tolerance, such as having participants hold their hand in a bucket of icy water for as long as they could. Groups that were allowed to swear during the experiment were able to withstand the cold longer than groups that could only say a neutral word. This is pretty compelling evidence that swearing helps increase pain tolerance.

Although profanity seems to originate from a more primitive region of the brain, it has also been proposed that the use of profanity depends on trust. Essentially, our frequency of use of profane language depends on how much we trust the person to whom we’re talking. If you trust someone more, you probably feel more confident they won’t dislike you for swearing. You may now be thinking, “Hey, doesn’t developing relationships and trust require higher order executive functions? Why aren’t they processed in those regions?”

One possible explanation for this is that profanity, along with words of affirmation or negation, and words having deep personal significance are all related to emotional expression. When we have a strong enough emotional reaction to something, whether it’s positive or negative, there is some thought that we reach the end of regular language.

Alternatively, maybe profanity use indicates we are not yet advanced enough to take full advantage of the frontal lobe.
​

So does more swearing indicate that we’re more primitive or more advanced? The jury’s still out on that. After all, sometimes you just need to let your feelings out.

*According to
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 1740. Here is the NY Books article that mentions it, or if you need a greater variety of words to express your feelings about the Trump administration, you can check out the other books mentioned in the article!
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Remember the Time You Forgot Four Years of Your Life?

2/5/2017

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by Lauren Lin

All of us have heard funny stories about things we did when we were toddlers and preschoolers, but why can’t we recall these events ourselves?  Being unable to remember experiences that we had before turning three or four, a phenomenon called infantile amnesia, is probably one of the strangest things to happen to us during development.       

Sigmund Freud, who coined the term infantile amnesia, theorized that people forget the first few years of their lives because they repress inappropriate and traumatic memories from their childhood as a defense mechanism.  This ties into his psychosexual theory of development, which maps out five stages, each focusing on a specific body part linked to our sexual drives.  By progressing through or becoming stuck on certain stages while exploring their sexuality, children slowly form their personalities and behaviour as an adult.  Although recent findings support Freud’s observations of infantile amnesia, his theory for why it happens has been discredited.
    

The current model of infantile amnesia includes both the inability to recall any events from around the ages of two to three, as well as having very few memories between the ages of three to seven.  This indicates that infantile amnesia isn’t a sudden switch from when are able to remember everything to when we start to forget our life events.  However, you might wonder that if young children are still able to remember what happens in their lives, like their birthday parties and what they did at school, when do we start forgetting these things?  In a study done by Abbema and Bauer, three-year-old children were told to talk about recent events with their mothers. Then, the children were brought back at ages seven, eight, or nine, to recall the events from when they were three. This study found that the number of nine-year-olds who could recall the same events was significantly lower than the number of seven-year-olds who could recall the events.  Therefore, they concluded that the progression of the amnesia seems to happen quickly between the ages of seven and nine. This rapid amnesia cannot be explained by how people forget memories normally (i.e. as more time passes, the more likely you are to forget something).  In fact, when adults aged 20, 35, and 70 were asked to recall childhood memories, there were no drastic differences between the age groups.  
    

Another theory behind the cause of infantile amnesia examines the impact of language.  Learning a language, and subsequently encoding our memories in terms of verbal cues, might explain our inability to remember events that happen before we are fully fluent in a language.  Although this theory is supported by research, many believe it to be incomplete, since children are able to form memories before learning languages (suggesting that language is not essential for memory). Non-human animals also display signs of infantile amnesia, and there have been cases in which children were able to recode preverbal memories with verbal cues.  

​For example, in a
2007 study, two-year-olds were shown a remote-controlled bubble machine with six colours of bubble mixture.  Experimenters taught the children that only a specific colour of bubble mixture would work in the machine. The colour was pointed out to the children, without providing a name for it. The children had two days to play with the machine, and the experimenters only turned it on when a certain colour was put in.  In the following weeks, the children were taught colour names, and then were asked to name the colour of mixture that turned on the bubble machine, to point out the colour on a colour chart, and to actually put the colour mixture into the bubble machine to activate it.  They found that more children were able to name the target colour than if it occurred by chance, suggesting that their previous experience with the colour could have helped with learning the colour name.  However, about 75% of the children were unable to name the target colour even though they could point to it, indicating that most children were unable to recode their preverbal memories with verbal cues.  Despite disproving the belief that children cannot recode their memories verbally, this study also provides evidence that there are still many children who aren’t able to re-code their memories.  As language abilities improve, people rely more on language for encoding memories, which may be the reason why most preverbal memories are lost.  The relationship between language development and infantile amnesia is complex and still not completely understood, but it does imply that infantile amnesia stems from a problem with retrieval rather than storage.  
    

In Carolyn Rovee-Collier’s study on infant memory, she taught infants to kick a ribbon to move a crib mobile. The infants were able to remember how to activate the mobile, showing that they already developed memory systems and mechanisms similar to an adult’s. Rovee-Collier also found that if she modelled how to activate the mobile herself, the younger infants who had forgotten how to do it after a few days or weeks were able to remember how to kick to start the mobile. This suggests that the memory had not been lost. Additionally, if an object on the mobile was switched, infants no longer remembered to kick.  Some researchers hypothesize that we can’t retrieve some memories because contextual prompts have changed, since we grow taller and sometimes have to look downwards on things that used to be much higher than we were.  Rovee-Collier also suggests that “contextual information disappears from memories that have been reactivated once or twice,” and so we might sometimes recall a childhood memory but not register that it is an early memory because we have forgotten where and when it took place.   
    

In addition to language and changing contextual cues, there seems to be a biological cause for infantile amnesia.  Josselyn and Frankland suggest that infantile amnesia may be caused by continued neurogenesis in the hippocampus, an area of the brain that is heavily associated with memory.  This seems to be supported by the fact that only when the formation of new neurons slows down, we are able to have long-term memories.  They propose that rapid neurogenesis might be disrupting synaptic connections that exist in previously established hippocampal memory circuits, and so those memories aren’t intact anymore.  However, Josselyn and Frankland don’t think that hippocampal neurogenesis is the sole factor in infantile amnesia, especially since the hippocampus is connected with multiple other brain structures involved in memory.  
    

To conclude, infantile amnesia seems to be caused by an inability to retrieve our memories and is not a result of losing them or having them thrown away into the Memory Dump like in the movie Inside Out.  It would be incredibly interesting if researchers found a way for us to recall our childhood memories, but considering all the embarrassing situations we probably got ourselves into as kids, it might be better to preserve infantile amnesia.

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