September 18, 2023 • 40 mins
We all know people who hate the word "moist". But why are they fine with synonyms such as "damp" or "wet"? What’s going on in their brains, and what does this have to do with synesthesia, autism, shapes, slacks, and sound probabilities? Join this week's episode as Eagleman leads us into the new and wild world of word aversion.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
We all know people who hate the word moist, But
why are they okay with synonyms like damp or muggy
or wet. What's going on in their brains and what
does this have to do with shapes or autism or synesthesia.
Welcome to another episode of Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman,
(00:29):
all about the magical three pounds of matter that constitute
your reality. In today's episode, we're going to talk about
a wild and relatively new example of the differences between
(00:54):
people's internal cosmoses. We're going to talk about word aversion.
Imagine that you find a tribe of people with little
contact with the outside world, and they show you that
they have some shapes that they draw. One of them
is a round, blobby object, and another shape is a sharp,
(01:18):
spiky star pattern. Now you figure out that one of
these they call bouba and the other they call kiki.
And the question I have for you is which do
you think is which is the blobby thing called kiki
and the starburst thing is called buba? Or would you
(01:38):
guess it's the other way around? If you are like
essentially everyone else on the planet, you guessed that the
blobby object was called buba, and the sharp object was
called kiki. Now, the buba kiki effect was something studied
in a psychology paper a century ago, and it was
a little surprising because essentially everybody gives the same answer,
(02:03):
linking the soft sounding word with the soft looking object
and vice versa. But this is surprising because in general,
there's really not supposed to be a relationship between the
sound of a word and what it looks like. But
what this tells us is that we sometimes have relationships
(02:23):
across the senses. And if you heard my episode on synesthesia,
episode four, you'll know that a fraction of people, probably
between five and ten percent, have this kind of blending
of the senses in more unusual ways. For example, they
might see letters and that triggers a color experience for them,
(02:46):
where they might hear something, and that triggers a visual
shape for them where they might taste something and that
puts a feeling on their fingertips and so on. Now,
I'm going to come back to this issue of synesthesia.
That want to return to the issue of the sound
of a word. So let me begin by pointing out
(03:08):
that in general, the sound of a word has no
relationship to its meaning. You can call a car an
automobile or a vehicle or whatever. We don't just call
it a room. So the sound that we make with
our mouth car is usually quite arbitrary, and you can
(03:29):
see this by comparing across languages, where you can call
it a mahonite or che or vatur or whatever. So
the sound of a word and its meaning are typically unconnected.
But it's not always so simple, because sometimes we do
find a strange relationship between sound and meaning. Think of
(03:53):
on amotopeia, where a word imitates phonetically, in other words,
in sound what it describes. For example, for a gun
firing we say bang. It's a mapping between the sound
and the meaning that's not arbitrary. Or describing the sound
a fly makes as buzz, or describing the sound of
(04:16):
cat makes as hiss, And there are lots of examples
of onomatopeia, like the sound of something breaking we say crash,
or the sound of something plunking into the water, or
the sound of a clock we use TikTok, or when
we think about the sound of cat makes in English,
we say meow, or for a dog woof or a
(04:38):
frog ribbit. These are all examples of words that have
a phonetic relationship with the thing they describe. In other words,
they sound like it. And sometimes these relationships between sound
and meaning are even more subtle. There's something called phonus themes,
which are clusters of sound that you find in common
(05:01):
across related words in a language. So in English we
find the sound made by gl or ghul is associated
with light or shining. Think about words like gleam, glitter, glisten, glow,
and more loosely, words like glorious or glamorous. Across all
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these words, which are cousins in meaning, you find the
same sound. So linguists are aware that sometimes there are
mappings between the way a word sounds and its meaning,
but there's not much known about the more specific relationship
between word sounds and an unusual emotional response that can
(05:48):
be triggered. So I got interested in this question because
something didn't escape my notice and probably not yours either,
And that's the fact that some fraction of my friends
can stand certain words. This is something that struck the
author George Saunders when he was giving a reading of
a new book he'd just published, and he was surprised
(06:10):
that people in the audience didn't really seem to mind
his really rough language with the cussing and the sex
scenes and so on. But two people told him that
they really hated that he used the word moist. His
cousin who was there, said it made her feel a
little physically ill when he used it. And then he
(06:31):
gave a reading in a different location, and his sister
was there and she said the same thing. Her reaction
wasn't to the risk a language and scenes, but to
a single word moist. Now, as it turns out, lots
of people, people you know or people you love, they
hate the word moist. It triggers a feeling of aversion
(06:54):
or disgust. For some people, this makes cooking shows unwatchable,
or they can't read an article about forestry and soil
or whatever. Moist is famous for being a word that
many people despise, but moist is just one word of
many consider the word tender, the word slacks, the word tissue. Now,
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many of you listening don't mind these words at all,
and others are disgusted by these or consider words like
the yellow thing inside an egg, the word yoke. Some
people hate that word and many other words come up
in our studies as being unusually hated words like nourish, bulge, pulp, giggle,
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fluffy nugget, or there was a guy who got interested
in astronomy but got put off by the term globular cluster.
So this phenomenon is called word aversion, and what it
involves are words that are neutral in their meaning, like
tissue or a globular cluster or whatever. There's no particular
(08:06):
emotional meaning to the word, but it triggers a feeling
of repugnance in some fraction of the population. My colleague
Mark Lieberman, who's a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania,
he set out to give a clear definition of word aversion.
He said, it's quote a feeling of intense, irrational distaste
(08:29):
for the sounder sight of a particular word or phrase,
not because its use is regarded as etymologically wrong or
logically wrong or grammatically wrong, nor because it's felt to
be overused or redundant or trendy or non standard, but
simply because the word itself somehow feels unpleasant or even disgusting.
(08:53):
End quote. So I want to be clear that there
are all kinds of words that you can hate for
other reasons. You might find some word snobbish or foolish,
or you might think that it's being used incorrectly. But
those are all different from word aversion, and we're not
talking about politically charged words like words that are sexually
(09:15):
taboo or religiously taboo, or ethnic slurs or other offensive words.
Word aversion is a different thing. And Lieberman points out
that while people say they hate words like moist, it's
not the angry kind of hate. It's more the cringe, shudder, shiver,
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gives me the willies kind of hate. As an example,
one person online said, and I quote the word panties
grosses me out, and hypercorrect usage of whom annoys me.
But the feelings I get when I hear them are
two distinct sensations that I would never confuse end quote.
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So the scientific mindset cares about this distinction and understanding
what is going on here, And my lab got interested
in this because we saw that word aversion provided an
inroad to study this strange and unexpected relationship between sound
and emotion. Now, before we dig in on this, I
(10:20):
want to fully flesh out word a version with some examples.
And there's a ton of information about word a version
spread all around online forums. So I'll just give you
some examples to enhance our intuitions about this. One woman
named Lisa posted quote, there's one word that I hate
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above all others. If I come across it, I must
immediately declare my hatred of it to anyone who is
there to listen. If there's no one around, I'll resort
to primal arguing and hit the page where the word resides.
The word is hard scrabble. I don't have a logical
reason for hate this word. I haven't had a traumatic
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experience with it in the past. I simply find it revolting.
It's ugly. End quote. Someone else posted luggage. Can't stand
that word luggage. It just feels gross. End quote. Someone
else says I hate the word pugilist. Another says tissue shiver.
(11:23):
It gives me the willies. Someone else writes, my girlfriend's
sister hates the word moist fist used together. So if
you start looking around, you'll find literally thousands of posts
and discussions about this, which, from a scientific point of view,
suggests that there's something to be understood here. Now. Quite commonly,
(11:44):
when you look through these forums, you see words like
moist and fleshy, and panties, but there are lots of
other words that are less expected. One woman reports, quote,
my mother hated gut, would not let us say it,
as if it were the worst word in English. End quote.
Other people online give examples like goose, pimple, or a
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chunk or wedge, or meal or baffle or squab or cornucopia.
One person pointed to the word giggle and said he
hates that word quote with the concentrated hatred of a
thousand hate filled sons. End quote, fudge conduit. One person
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said his aversive words were a gig motif and whimsy.
He says, quote no rational reason, just hate them unquote.
Now there are a few important clues that we need
to note here. The first thing is that not everyone
experiences word aversion. In fact, most people don't, and this
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is something I'll come back to in a bit. But
of course it's hard to know what fraction of the
population has this. So about a decade ago, Mark Lieberman
decided to take a cre creative shot at gathering some data.
He noted that the problem with scraping people's online postings
about word a version was that it can't tell you
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what fraction of people experience it. In other words, how
many people have word a version? Because if a commenter
writes how aversive moist is to them, you don't know
if that poster represents one out of five people or
one out of five hundred. So Lieberman had an interesting
idea to look at famous authors and see how often
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they use the word moist. Now, just a side note
that this is the kind of experiment that you can
do now, but you couldn't do this twenty five years
ago because you need to analyze every word of the
entire corpus of each author, everything they've ever written. Nowadays
this seems trivial, but I just want to point out
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that this kind of questioning and answering was just not
available even a generation ago. So we're living in terrific times, Okay.
So he tapped into projects Gutenberg, which was an early
project to digitize books and make them searchable, and using
that approach, which was still a little rough back in
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twenty twelve. When he did this, he analyzed the complete
works of fifty authors. So this was about one hundred
and twenty five million words, with an average of about
two and a half million words per author, and he
found that on average, there were about six appearances of
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the word moist per million words. Now here's the interesting part.
He found that for some authors, like Jane Austen, for instance,
there was never a single mention ever of the word moist.
If it was just a random draw, the fact that
she never ever used moist would have a probability of
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happening by chance of zero point seven, in other words,
a very low probability of that happening just by chance.
On the other hand, some authors use it plenty. The
short story writer Brett Hart from the eighteen hundreds used
fifty six moists, or about twenty two times for every
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million words. But compare rehtt Hart to Mark Twain, who
lived at almost exactly the same time. Mark Twain only
used the word moist two times in his entire career,
and he wrote a lot more so. Mark Twain used
only zero point five moists per million words, or forty
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four times less often than Brett Hart. And by the way,
Lieberman points out that one of Twain's uses of the
word moist hardly counts because it was part of a
long made up name of an elephant, and the other
use of moist Lieberman asks with a question mark whether
that single use of the word might have been in
(16:00):
by an editor. In any case, this kind of literary
detective work reveals that some authors are happy to use
the word and others avoided completely in every sentence they've
ever published in their entire career. Now you might point
out that maybe these authors just wrote about different topics
and so moistness just didn't come up. So to address that,
(16:23):
Lieberman quantified other humidity related words like wet, damp, or
dry or arid, and he did the calculations on those,
and he found that Mark Twain used plenty of such words,
He had about half the rate of Brett Hart, even
while his use of the particular word moist was forty
four times less frequent. So by looking at someone's entire
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corpus of writing, you might be able to tell something
about who hated moist and who didn't care. Now, why
is there any difference between people? Well, let's take a
quick dive version into another area that my lab is
studied for a long time, sinesthesia. These reports of word
aversion immediately grabbed my attention because in sinesthesia, as I
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mentioned at the beginning, we see a cross blending of
the senses. So sounds of certain words might trigger a
color experience, or a texture or a taste, and word
aversion sounds quite a bit like that. We're talking about
sensory experiences that we usually consider as separate and distinct,
but in some people the lines between these different sensations
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aren't so rigid. And so although we typically think of
synesthesia as triggering colors or sounds, there certainly seem to
be examples where any emotion is triggered, and often it's
an emotion of aversion or disgust. So something I've previously
suggested in the literature is that the sensory processing disorder
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that we see in autism is actually a kind of synesthesia.
Sensory processing disorder is when you see a kid who
can't stand certain sounds it drives them nuts, like the
sound of a vacuum or the sound of a zipper
or somebody chewing or so on. So I think that
is a form of synesthesia, But instead of a region
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of the brain like color getting triggered, it's regions involved
in aversion. There are a whole bunch of circuits in
the brain involved in pain and disgust or itch or whatever.
So if sensory processing disorder is a form of synesthesia,
you can see why word a version grabbed my attention.
I wondered if there might be some sinesthetic relationship here,
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that a person might get this cross blending of different
senses with the sound of the word and an emotion
that that triggers. Instead of colors, one gets a feeling
instead of indigo blue, one gets the creeps. So I
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got very interested in understanding what was going on here,
And the first thing I zoomed in on was that
for people with word aversion, it doesn't happen for all words,
just certain words. So how could we drill down on that?
First I found in the literature that there had been
a study on word aversion. A researcher named Paul Thibodeau
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explored what he called moist aversion, and it was binary,
in other words, just based on your yes or no
answer to the question would you characterize yourself as being
particularly averse to the word moist. But we know that
word a version is much broader than moist aversion. Many
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other words appear all the time in self reports of
word aversion, like tender or slax or nugget or tissue.
So Thibodeau's study was an important first step in understanding
word of version, but it left a lot unanswered. Okay,
so what were the next steps for us? If aversive
words were only words like moist, we might think it's
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some reference to the meaning of the word. But something
I noticed is that people often clarified that they were
fine with alternative words or synonyms. Even if they hated
the word panties. They were fine with words like undies
and thong, just not panties. And even if they hated
the word moist, they were fine using synonyms in its place,
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like damp or humid, or muggy or wet. So that
suggests it's not just about the meaning, but perhaps there
was something else going on. And with so many of
the other words that show up on these lists, it's
essentially impossible to think of any meaning, even several degrees
away that could possibly be triggering. Who has anything against
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the word giggle or wedge or luggage. So one possibility
that suggested itself is that it's the sound of the word,
not just the meaning, that was the basis for the aversion.
And so we got interested in this question, and I
started looking into this with a student of mine, Hannah Bosley,
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who's now a clinical psychologist in Berkeley, and we ran
a study in my lab to figure out more about
word a version. Now, what other reasons do we have
for thinking that the sound of the word has anything
to do with it. Well, first of all, it's not
uncommon to hear things from people with word a version
who point to a phonetic detail, in other words, how
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the word sounds like that they hate words that contain
the sound oil or oiin. An example of this is
the word ointment, which is despised almost as much as
moist and the political writer William Safire pointed out that
the oise sound triggers an aversion in some people, and
he said he thinks this is why some people insist
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on being called an attorney instead of a lawyer, or
other people hate the word shibbleth even if they don't
know what it means. Or one guy online noted that
he has word a version to any word beginning with cht,
like Cathonic or Cathonian, and he doesn't like similar words
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like Cthulhu, which was a creature created by the sci
fi writer Lovecraft in nineteen twenty eight. So many, many
of the words that people find aversive seem unrelated to
the meaning and more about the sound. So we focused
in on the sound issues at play. What is the
mapping between how something sounds and the emotion it triggers.
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So we tested two hundred and forty four people and
what we did is we built three lists of words
matched by the first letter and the length. The first
list was aversive words based on the most commonly reported
disliked words in online forums, so words like moist and
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tender and slacks and giggle and so on. And list
number two was a list of other words generated from
a word generator that matched in length or meaning or
first letter. These were in different experiments, but these were
all neutral words that nobody found versive. And the third
list was nonsense words that had the same phoning frequency
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of English, but they were totally made up, like strains
or yin's or pilp. So as an example, slacks might
be the commonly reported aversive word, and then we tested
against the word slopes which is neutral, and slent, which
is a nonsense word meaning it's a word that's just
made up. Or another example is moist and moose and
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ritz or a giggle and pickle, and gampin. So we
asked participants to read words and record their feelings about
the sound of the words. So you see a word
presented on the screen from any of these categories, and
with each word you rate it on a scale from
most unpleasant to most pleasant. So what did we find.
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The average rating for the aversive word group was significantly
more unpleasant than the real word controls. So we know
that a subset of the population has greater than average
version of these words, but what we had was a
random population sample. But even here we find that the
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pre selected aversive words are more unpleasant on average than
the matched control words. So that suggests that there may
be something different about these aversive words like moist and slacks,
and that causes these words to be more commonly disliked.
But we also found something unexpected, which was that the
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most unpleasant words for people were the nonsense words. In
other words, to our surprise, the nonsense words like gloike
and frajoians and ulvasus and pesmeri and nullogh were even
more aversive than the words that we intended to be aversive.
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So what does that mean? Well, we started to examine
why we got that result, what is it about the
aversive words and the nonsense words that's getting to some people?
It presumably has something to do with the particular phonemes,
the sounds and the words, but what well. One idea
that people have suggested is that particular phonemes may inherently
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connote a pleasant or unpleasant valance. For example, there was
an eighteenth century Russian poet named Mikhail Lemonzov who asserted
that tender or positive or pleasant subjects should be described
using vowels like I and e, and that unpleasant, fear
evoking subjects should be described using vowels like oh and ah.
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But this isn't generally the same from language to language,
or even from person to person. And so we started
to consider the possibility that perhaps certain sounds go with
certain emotions because those sounds occur with different frequencies in
a given language. So why would it matter if some
sound is more likely to occur than another. Well, in psychology,
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there's a phenomenon known as the mere exposure effect, in
which people tend to prefer familiar items or concepts over
unfamiliar ones. This is so important that I'm gonna take
a minute to talk about this. The mere exposure of
is also known as the familiarity principle, and it points
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to the fact that people develop a preference or a
liking for things that they are exposed to repeatedly, even
if they were neutral to it at the beginning. The
more you encounter something, the more you tend to like it,
and this is true, by the way, whether or not
you consciously remember encountering it before. This has been shown
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in a million studies. From the people we meet to
the products we encounter, familiarity breeds preference. For example, you
might find yourself gravitating towards a particular song on the
radio after you hear it a few times, or you
might feel more comfortable with someone that you've met a
few times, even if you didn't feel a strong initial connection.
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The mere exposure effect highlights the brain's inclination to find
comfort in the familiar. Now. Possibly this is because repeated
exposure reduces the uncertainty or the perceived threat associated with
anything unfamiliar, so over time, this increased comfort results in
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a preference or a liking. And by the way, the
way that you study this in the lab is you
show people shapes or faces or words that they haven't
seen before, and you have them rate them, and what
you find is that they tend to rate these things
more positively after being exposed to them multiple times, even
if they're not consciously aware of the exposures. And this
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mere exposure effect is leveraged all the time by marketers
and advertisers who use repetition to make products more appealing.
This is why companies will pay a lot of money
to have their product appear in the background of a
television show or a movie, because that way we feel
closer to it. We warm up to things that we
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encounter frequently. Now, this is issue of familiarity. It also
applies in the realm of language. If you're exposed more
to certain sounds, you come to prefer those over infrequent ones.
So we explored whether this familiarity effect holds true at
the level of sounds to explain word a version, so
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we calculated the probability of certain sounds going together in
the English language. Essentially, if you look at a word,
how word like or well formed it is. So, for example,
take the word blick. It doesn't violate any sound constraints
in English. But if you have the word benick that's
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less permissible because of the initial b n sound. So essentially,
the less a word sounds like other English words, the
lower its probability is. If you want to know, this
is called phonotactic probability. And by the way, if you
want to read all the details of the study, I'm
linking our paper at eagleman dot com slash podcast. So
(30:03):
what we found is that the phonotactic probability how likely
different sounds go together. This mapped right onto what we
found for the scores. The nonsense words, which everyone hated,
had the lowest probability of existing as words. They were
the least word like in the sense of all these
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sounds ending up together. Now, the aversive words like moist
and slacks and nugget had higher probabilities of those sounds
going together, but these were less probable than the control words,
the words that nobody minded. So the control words had
the highest probability of the sounds going together. So sound
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groupings that were improbable mapped onto higher aversion. And then
we looked at a related measure. You can calculate what's
called the neighborhood density for any word. This just tells
you how many words differ from your word by only
one phoneme. So for instance, cat has many neighbors like
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sad or bad or bat or can or cow and
so on. Or neighbors of the word urge are earth
and earl and edge and urn and age. You just
change one sound in the word and you're at some
other new word. So some words have lots of neighbors,
but others don't. And so neighborhood density measures how similar
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sounding a word is to other words, and we find
the same result here. The nonsense words, on average, had
the fewest neighbors. They had the fewest words that sounded
like them, and people hated these the most. Then you
had the aversive words like moist, and they had some
more neighbors to them. And finally, the control words had
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the most neighbors. So if you're a word with fewer
other words that sound like you, you are more unfamiliar.
And again this suggests that unfamiliarity plays a key part
in the experience of aversion. So words with improbable combinations
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of sounds that sounded less like other English words, these
were more likely to be unpleasant. Unfamiliarity correlates with aversion.
Now just to wrap this study. I suspect that linguistic familiarity,
like we explored here, is just one important piece of
the word aversion puzzle, because there's a lot of variability
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in the data that's not explained fully by familiarity. For
a full explanation, we'd almost certainly have to include the
meaning of the word as well as something about an
individual's prior experience of that particular word. So there's still
plenty to do in terms of understanding who has this
and who doesn't, and surveying speakers in other languages beyond
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English to understand about their word a versions. Just as
an example, one Spanish speaker I saw said she has
a horrible aversion to words like socopar, which means to
cover up. She can't stand the word. So we can
find these same principles across languages, and we need to
understand what that tells us. And I think there are
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other questions too, like is it only negative emotions? Maybe
certain words trigger really positive emotions, but maybe for some
reason that doesn't get talked about as much. And finally,
my lab and others have been searching for the genes
that underpins synesthesia and the signatures in the brain of
this crosstalk. The question is what do these look like
(34:02):
for word aversion? But what we can already see is
that in some people, certain sounds trigger emotions, and this
seems to be another form of synesthesia, where there's a
blending between regions of the brain that are normally a
little more separate. Now, as I noted at the beginning,
only some fraction of the population experiences word aversion, and
(34:25):
it's hard to estimate that percentage until you do a
careful population study, let's say, testing ten thousand people about it.
But I want to flag something important here, which is
that doing a population study, say on the internet, isn't
totally straightforward, and it has to be done carefully because
people often confuse word aversion for whatever their own pet
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peeves are, like what we discussed earlier, what words they
find overused or used mistakenly, or a word that's elitist
or patronizing or whatever. Now, why might people confuse these
things with word aversion, Because, as I've discussed throughout the
Inner Cosmos podcast, it's often really hard to imagine what
(35:13):
it is like to be in someone else's head. And
if you don't know that experience can be different for
different people. It's easy to mistakenly believe that everyone must
be having the same experience that you're having on the inside,
and so we interpret new information by shoving it into
(35:36):
our own model of the world, even when it doesn't
quite fit. In other words, someone tells you that they
feel a certain way, and you say, I know exactly
how you feel. Well, you may or may not. You
can only interpret their story through the lens of your
own experience. So when the study of word aversion first began,
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it took a lot of effort to convince people who
didn't have word a version that this was a thing.
Why because they were interpreting the claim through only a
single perspective on the world. As an example, there was
a British guy I saw online who didn't experience word
a version, and so he asserted that this was quote
an American thing that didn't exist in British English. Well,
(36:20):
we now know he's incorrect about that. Many Brits have this,
but he's making the common but fundamental error of assuming
that because he doesn't experience it, British people in general
do not. And I stumbled on several comments about this online,
especially when this all started a decade ago, where people
(36:41):
would say things like word a version is a quote
rare and weird neurotic behavior that's being talked about by
point one percent of women. Because we know these aren't
the numbers. This is another example of our naive internal models,
where we tend to assume that if if we don't
experience something, it's because it doesn't exist and other people
(37:04):
are just making it up. It's just like I talked
about in other episodes about synesthesia or how we visualize things,
like some people imagine a scene like a movie and
others have no particular image at all in their heads.
Or take mental illness. For millennia, the approach to mental
illness was to say, just toughen up, or in other
(37:27):
cases it was we can torture you until you start
acting normally. It took literally thousands of years before people
started to realize that the experience in one person's head
can be different than the experience in their own and
what happened through history happens in the course of our
own lifetime too. A large part of your passage into
(37:51):
maturity is realizing that people can be quite different on
the inside and coming to override the assumption that every
one is having an experience just like yours. So, to
wrap up today's episode, reality is not one size fits all.
Two people can listen to the same words, and for
(38:12):
one it's aversive and for the other it's totally neutral.
It's just like eating cilantro or the feel of wool
against your skin. You can have two humans experiencing the
same event and having very different experiences. The important lesson
to keep in mind here is that if you are
only trying to understand your own reality, you're like a
(38:32):
fish in water trying to describe water. It's impossible to
describe what water is because you've never seen anything other
than that. But when you see a different way that
things can be, that gives you a broader platform from
which to build theories. And that's one of our deepest
goals in neuroscience, to understand how the specific microscopic activity
(38:58):
in your three many pounds of wet, gushy, alien computational
material maps onto the world that you see and enjoy
every day, How the unique activity in your head maps
onto the view that you're looking at right now, the
feel of your clothes on your skin, the sound of
(39:19):
my voice in your ear because for each of us,
reality is a little bit different. Go to Eagleman dot
com slash podcast for more reading and more information. Send
me an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com with
(39:40):
questions or discussion, and I'll be making an episode soon
in which i address those. Until next time, I'm David Eagleman,
signing off from the Inner Cosmos assas
We all know people who hate the word moist, But
why are they okay with synonyms like damp or muggy
or wet. What's going on in their brains and what
does this have to do with shapes or autism or synesthesia.
Welcome to another episode of Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman,
(00:29):
all about the magical three pounds of matter that constitute
your reality. In today's episode, we're going to talk about
a wild and relatively new example of the differences between
(00:54):
people's internal cosmoses. We're going to talk about word aversion.
Imagine that you find a tribe of people with little
contact with the outside world, and they show you that
they have some shapes that they draw. One of them
is a round, blobby object, and another shape is a sharp,
(01:18):
spiky star pattern. Now you figure out that one of
these they call bouba and the other they call kiki.
And the question I have for you is which do
you think is which is the blobby thing called kiki
and the starburst thing is called buba? Or would you
(01:38):
guess it's the other way around? If you are like
essentially everyone else on the planet, you guessed that the
blobby object was called buba, and the sharp object was
called kiki. Now, the buba kiki effect was something studied
in a psychology paper a century ago, and it was
a little surprising because essentially everybody gives the same answer,
(02:03):
linking the soft sounding word with the soft looking object
and vice versa. But this is surprising because in general,
there's really not supposed to be a relationship between the
sound of a word and what it looks like. But
what this tells us is that we sometimes have relationships
(02:23):
across the senses. And if you heard my episode on synesthesia,
episode four, you'll know that a fraction of people, probably
between five and ten percent, have this kind of blending
of the senses in more unusual ways. For example, they
might see letters and that triggers a color experience for them,
(02:46):
where they might hear something, and that triggers a visual
shape for them where they might taste something and that
puts a feeling on their fingertips and so on. Now,
I'm going to come back to this issue of synesthesia.
That want to return to the issue of the sound
of a word. So let me begin by pointing out
(03:08):
that in general, the sound of a word has no
relationship to its meaning. You can call a car an
automobile or a vehicle or whatever. We don't just call
it a room. So the sound that we make with
our mouth car is usually quite arbitrary, and you can
(03:29):
see this by comparing across languages, where you can call
it a mahonite or che or vatur or whatever. So
the sound of a word and its meaning are typically unconnected.
But it's not always so simple, because sometimes we do
find a strange relationship between sound and meaning. Think of
(03:53):
on amotopeia, where a word imitates phonetically, in other words,
in sound what it describes. For example, for a gun
firing we say bang. It's a mapping between the sound
and the meaning that's not arbitrary. Or describing the sound
a fly makes as buzz, or describing the sound of
(04:16):
cat makes as hiss, And there are lots of examples
of onomatopeia, like the sound of something breaking we say crash,
or the sound of something plunking into the water, or
the sound of a clock we use TikTok, or when
we think about the sound of cat makes in English,
we say meow, or for a dog woof or a
(04:38):
frog ribbit. These are all examples of words that have
a phonetic relationship with the thing they describe. In other words,
they sound like it. And sometimes these relationships between sound
and meaning are even more subtle. There's something called phonus themes,
which are clusters of sound that you find in common
(05:01):
across related words in a language. So in English we
find the sound made by gl or ghul is associated
with light or shining. Think about words like gleam, glitter, glisten, glow,
and more loosely, words like glorious or glamorous. Across all
(05:26):
these words, which are cousins in meaning, you find the
same sound. So linguists are aware that sometimes there are
mappings between the way a word sounds and its meaning,
but there's not much known about the more specific relationship
between word sounds and an unusual emotional response that can
(05:48):
be triggered. So I got interested in this question because
something didn't escape my notice and probably not yours either,
And that's the fact that some fraction of my friends
can stand certain words. This is something that struck the
author George Saunders when he was giving a reading of
a new book he'd just published, and he was surprised
(06:10):
that people in the audience didn't really seem to mind
his really rough language with the cussing and the sex
scenes and so on. But two people told him that
they really hated that he used the word moist. His
cousin who was there, said it made her feel a
little physically ill when he used it. And then he
(06:31):
gave a reading in a different location, and his sister
was there and she said the same thing. Her reaction
wasn't to the risk a language and scenes, but to
a single word moist. Now, as it turns out, lots
of people, people you know or people you love, they
hate the word moist. It triggers a feeling of aversion
(06:54):
or disgust. For some people, this makes cooking shows unwatchable,
or they can't read an article about forestry and soil
or whatever. Moist is famous for being a word that
many people despise, but moist is just one word of
many consider the word tender, the word slacks, the word tissue. Now,
(07:20):
many of you listening don't mind these words at all,
and others are disgusted by these or consider words like
the yellow thing inside an egg, the word yoke. Some
people hate that word and many other words come up
in our studies as being unusually hated words like nourish, bulge, pulp, giggle,
(07:44):
fluffy nugget, or there was a guy who got interested
in astronomy but got put off by the term globular cluster.
So this phenomenon is called word aversion, and what it
involves are words that are neutral in their meaning, like
tissue or a globular cluster or whatever. There's no particular
(08:06):
emotional meaning to the word, but it triggers a feeling
of repugnance in some fraction of the population. My colleague
Mark Lieberman, who's a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania,
he set out to give a clear definition of word aversion.
He said, it's quote a feeling of intense, irrational distaste
(08:29):
for the sounder sight of a particular word or phrase,
not because its use is regarded as etymologically wrong or
logically wrong or grammatically wrong, nor because it's felt to
be overused or redundant or trendy or non standard, but
simply because the word itself somehow feels unpleasant or even disgusting.
(08:53):
End quote. So I want to be clear that there
are all kinds of words that you can hate for
other reasons. You might find some word snobbish or foolish,
or you might think that it's being used incorrectly. But
those are all different from word aversion, and we're not
talking about politically charged words like words that are sexually
(09:15):
taboo or religiously taboo, or ethnic slurs or other offensive words.
Word aversion is a different thing. And Lieberman points out
that while people say they hate words like moist, it's
not the angry kind of hate. It's more the cringe, shudder, shiver,
(09:36):
gives me the willies kind of hate. As an example,
one person online said, and I quote the word panties
grosses me out, and hypercorrect usage of whom annoys me.
But the feelings I get when I hear them are
two distinct sensations that I would never confuse end quote.
(09:59):
So the scientific mindset cares about this distinction and understanding
what is going on here, And my lab got interested
in this because we saw that word aversion provided an
inroad to study this strange and unexpected relationship between sound
and emotion. Now, before we dig in on this, I
(10:20):
want to fully flesh out word a version with some examples.
And there's a ton of information about word a version
spread all around online forums. So I'll just give you
some examples to enhance our intuitions about this. One woman
named Lisa posted quote, there's one word that I hate
(10:41):
above all others. If I come across it, I must
immediately declare my hatred of it to anyone who is
there to listen. If there's no one around, I'll resort
to primal arguing and hit the page where the word resides.
The word is hard scrabble. I don't have a logical
reason for hate this word. I haven't had a traumatic
(11:02):
experience with it in the past. I simply find it revolting.
It's ugly. End quote. Someone else posted luggage. Can't stand
that word luggage. It just feels gross. End quote. Someone
else says I hate the word pugilist. Another says tissue shiver.
(11:23):
It gives me the willies. Someone else writes, my girlfriend's
sister hates the word moist fist used together. So if
you start looking around, you'll find literally thousands of posts
and discussions about this, which, from a scientific point of view,
suggests that there's something to be understood here. Now. Quite commonly,
(11:44):
when you look through these forums, you see words like
moist and fleshy, and panties, but there are lots of
other words that are less expected. One woman reports, quote,
my mother hated gut, would not let us say it,
as if it were the worst word in English. End quote.
Other people online give examples like goose, pimple, or a
(12:06):
chunk or wedge, or meal or baffle or squab or cornucopia.
One person pointed to the word giggle and said he
hates that word quote with the concentrated hatred of a
thousand hate filled sons. End quote, fudge conduit. One person
(12:26):
said his aversive words were a gig motif and whimsy.
He says, quote no rational reason, just hate them unquote.
Now there are a few important clues that we need
to note here. The first thing is that not everyone
experiences word aversion. In fact, most people don't, and this
(12:48):
is something I'll come back to in a bit. But
of course it's hard to know what fraction of the
population has this. So about a decade ago, Mark Lieberman
decided to take a cre creative shot at gathering some data.
He noted that the problem with scraping people's online postings
about word a version was that it can't tell you
(13:10):
what fraction of people experience it. In other words, how
many people have word a version? Because if a commenter
writes how aversive moist is to them, you don't know
if that poster represents one out of five people or
one out of five hundred. So Lieberman had an interesting
idea to look at famous authors and see how often
(13:33):
they use the word moist. Now, just a side note
that this is the kind of experiment that you can
do now, but you couldn't do this twenty five years
ago because you need to analyze every word of the
entire corpus of each author, everything they've ever written. Nowadays
this seems trivial, but I just want to point out
(13:54):
that this kind of questioning and answering was just not
available even a generation ago. So we're living in terrific times, Okay.
So he tapped into projects Gutenberg, which was an early
project to digitize books and make them searchable, and using
that approach, which was still a little rough back in
(14:14):
twenty twelve. When he did this, he analyzed the complete
works of fifty authors. So this was about one hundred
and twenty five million words, with an average of about
two and a half million words per author, and he
found that on average, there were about six appearances of
(14:35):
the word moist per million words. Now here's the interesting part.
He found that for some authors, like Jane Austen, for instance,
there was never a single mention ever of the word moist.
If it was just a random draw, the fact that
she never ever used moist would have a probability of
(14:55):
happening by chance of zero point seven, in other words,
a very low probability of that happening just by chance.
On the other hand, some authors use it plenty. The
short story writer Brett Hart from the eighteen hundreds used
fifty six moists, or about twenty two times for every
(15:17):
million words. But compare rehtt Hart to Mark Twain, who
lived at almost exactly the same time. Mark Twain only
used the word moist two times in his entire career,
and he wrote a lot more so. Mark Twain used
only zero point five moists per million words, or forty
(15:39):
four times less often than Brett Hart. And by the way,
Lieberman points out that one of Twain's uses of the
word moist hardly counts because it was part of a
long made up name of an elephant, and the other
use of moist Lieberman asks with a question mark whether
that single use of the word might have been in
(16:00):
by an editor. In any case, this kind of literary
detective work reveals that some authors are happy to use
the word and others avoided completely in every sentence they've
ever published in their entire career. Now you might point
out that maybe these authors just wrote about different topics
and so moistness just didn't come up. So to address that,
(16:23):
Lieberman quantified other humidity related words like wet, damp, or
dry or arid, and he did the calculations on those,
and he found that Mark Twain used plenty of such words,
He had about half the rate of Brett Hart, even
while his use of the particular word moist was forty
four times less frequent. So by looking at someone's entire
(16:48):
corpus of writing, you might be able to tell something
about who hated moist and who didn't care. Now, why
is there any difference between people? Well, let's take a
quick dive version into another area that my lab is
studied for a long time, sinesthesia. These reports of word
aversion immediately grabbed my attention because in sinesthesia, as I
(17:12):
mentioned at the beginning, we see a cross blending of
the senses. So sounds of certain words might trigger a
color experience, or a texture or a taste, and word
aversion sounds quite a bit like that. We're talking about
sensory experiences that we usually consider as separate and distinct,
but in some people the lines between these different sensations
(17:36):
aren't so rigid. And so although we typically think of
synesthesia as triggering colors or sounds, there certainly seem to
be examples where any emotion is triggered, and often it's
an emotion of aversion or disgust. So something I've previously
suggested in the literature is that the sensory processing disorder
(17:58):
that we see in autism is actually a kind of synesthesia.
Sensory processing disorder is when you see a kid who
can't stand certain sounds it drives them nuts, like the
sound of a vacuum or the sound of a zipper
or somebody chewing or so on. So I think that
is a form of synesthesia, But instead of a region
(18:19):
of the brain like color getting triggered, it's regions involved
in aversion. There are a whole bunch of circuits in
the brain involved in pain and disgust or itch or whatever.
So if sensory processing disorder is a form of synesthesia,
you can see why word a version grabbed my attention.
I wondered if there might be some sinesthetic relationship here,
(18:43):
that a person might get this cross blending of different
senses with the sound of the word and an emotion
that that triggers. Instead of colors, one gets a feeling
instead of indigo blue, one gets the creeps. So I
(19:17):
got very interested in understanding what was going on here,
And the first thing I zoomed in on was that
for people with word aversion, it doesn't happen for all words,
just certain words. So how could we drill down on that?
First I found in the literature that there had been
a study on word aversion. A researcher named Paul Thibodeau
(19:38):
explored what he called moist aversion, and it was binary,
in other words, just based on your yes or no
answer to the question would you characterize yourself as being
particularly averse to the word moist. But we know that
word a version is much broader than moist aversion. Many
(19:58):
other words appear all the time in self reports of
word aversion, like tender or slax or nugget or tissue.
So Thibodeau's study was an important first step in understanding
word of version, but it left a lot unanswered. Okay,
so what were the next steps for us? If aversive
words were only words like moist, we might think it's
(20:20):
some reference to the meaning of the word. But something
I noticed is that people often clarified that they were
fine with alternative words or synonyms. Even if they hated
the word panties. They were fine with words like undies
and thong, just not panties. And even if they hated
the word moist, they were fine using synonyms in its place,
(20:44):
like damp or humid, or muggy or wet. So that
suggests it's not just about the meaning, but perhaps there
was something else going on. And with so many of
the other words that show up on these lists, it's
essentially impossible to think of any meaning, even several degrees
away that could possibly be triggering. Who has anything against
(21:07):
the word giggle or wedge or luggage. So one possibility
that suggested itself is that it's the sound of the word,
not just the meaning, that was the basis for the aversion.
And so we got interested in this question, and I
started looking into this with a student of mine, Hannah Bosley,
(21:27):
who's now a clinical psychologist in Berkeley, and we ran
a study in my lab to figure out more about
word a version. Now, what other reasons do we have
for thinking that the sound of the word has anything
to do with it. Well, first of all, it's not
uncommon to hear things from people with word a version
who point to a phonetic detail, in other words, how
(21:50):
the word sounds like that they hate words that contain
the sound oil or oiin. An example of this is
the word ointment, which is despised almost as much as
moist and the political writer William Safire pointed out that
the oise sound triggers an aversion in some people, and
he said he thinks this is why some people insist
(22:12):
on being called an attorney instead of a lawyer, or
other people hate the word shibbleth even if they don't
know what it means. Or one guy online noted that
he has word a version to any word beginning with cht,
like Cathonic or Cathonian, and he doesn't like similar words
(22:33):
like Cthulhu, which was a creature created by the sci
fi writer Lovecraft in nineteen twenty eight. So many, many
of the words that people find aversive seem unrelated to
the meaning and more about the sound. So we focused
in on the sound issues at play. What is the
mapping between how something sounds and the emotion it triggers.
(22:55):
So we tested two hundred and forty four people and
what we did is we built three lists of words
matched by the first letter and the length. The first
list was aversive words based on the most commonly reported
disliked words in online forums, so words like moist and
(23:16):
tender and slacks and giggle and so on. And list
number two was a list of other words generated from
a word generator that matched in length or meaning or
first letter. These were in different experiments, but these were
all neutral words that nobody found versive. And the third
list was nonsense words that had the same phoning frequency
(23:39):
of English, but they were totally made up, like strains
or yin's or pilp. So as an example, slacks might
be the commonly reported aversive word, and then we tested
against the word slopes which is neutral, and slent, which
is a nonsense word meaning it's a word that's just
made up. Or another example is moist and moose and
(24:03):
ritz or a giggle and pickle, and gampin. So we
asked participants to read words and record their feelings about
the sound of the words. So you see a word
presented on the screen from any of these categories, and
with each word you rate it on a scale from
most unpleasant to most pleasant. So what did we find.
(24:27):
The average rating for the aversive word group was significantly
more unpleasant than the real word controls. So we know
that a subset of the population has greater than average
version of these words, but what we had was a
random population sample. But even here we find that the
(24:48):
pre selected aversive words are more unpleasant on average than
the matched control words. So that suggests that there may
be something different about these aversive words like moist and slacks,
and that causes these words to be more commonly disliked.
But we also found something unexpected, which was that the
(25:08):
most unpleasant words for people were the nonsense words. In
other words, to our surprise, the nonsense words like gloike
and frajoians and ulvasus and pesmeri and nullogh were even
more aversive than the words that we intended to be aversive.
(25:28):
So what does that mean? Well, we started to examine
why we got that result, what is it about the
aversive words and the nonsense words that's getting to some people?
It presumably has something to do with the particular phonemes,
the sounds and the words, but what well. One idea
that people have suggested is that particular phonemes may inherently
(25:53):
connote a pleasant or unpleasant valance. For example, there was
an eighteenth century Russian poet named Mikhail Lemonzov who asserted
that tender or positive or pleasant subjects should be described
using vowels like I and e, and that unpleasant, fear
evoking subjects should be described using vowels like oh and ah.
(26:18):
But this isn't generally the same from language to language,
or even from person to person. And so we started
to consider the possibility that perhaps certain sounds go with
certain emotions because those sounds occur with different frequencies in
a given language. So why would it matter if some
sound is more likely to occur than another. Well, in psychology,
(26:43):
there's a phenomenon known as the mere exposure effect, in
which people tend to prefer familiar items or concepts over
unfamiliar ones. This is so important that I'm gonna take
a minute to talk about this. The mere exposure of
is also known as the familiarity principle, and it points
(27:04):
to the fact that people develop a preference or a
liking for things that they are exposed to repeatedly, even
if they were neutral to it at the beginning. The
more you encounter something, the more you tend to like it,
and this is true, by the way, whether or not
you consciously remember encountering it before. This has been shown
(27:26):
in a million studies. From the people we meet to
the products we encounter, familiarity breeds preference. For example, you
might find yourself gravitating towards a particular song on the
radio after you hear it a few times, or you
might feel more comfortable with someone that you've met a
few times, even if you didn't feel a strong initial connection.
(27:49):
The mere exposure effect highlights the brain's inclination to find
comfort in the familiar. Now. Possibly this is because repeated
exposure reduces the uncertainty or the perceived threat associated with
anything unfamiliar, so over time, this increased comfort results in
(28:10):
a preference or a liking. And by the way, the
way that you study this in the lab is you
show people shapes or faces or words that they haven't
seen before, and you have them rate them, and what
you find is that they tend to rate these things
more positively after being exposed to them multiple times, even
if they're not consciously aware of the exposures. And this
(28:34):
mere exposure effect is leveraged all the time by marketers
and advertisers who use repetition to make products more appealing.
This is why companies will pay a lot of money
to have their product appear in the background of a
television show or a movie, because that way we feel
closer to it. We warm up to things that we
(28:56):
encounter frequently. Now, this is issue of familiarity. It also
applies in the realm of language. If you're exposed more
to certain sounds, you come to prefer those over infrequent ones.
So we explored whether this familiarity effect holds true at
the level of sounds to explain word a version, so
(29:22):
we calculated the probability of certain sounds going together in
the English language. Essentially, if you look at a word,
how word like or well formed it is. So, for example,
take the word blick. It doesn't violate any sound constraints
in English. But if you have the word benick that's
(29:42):
less permissible because of the initial b n sound. So essentially,
the less a word sounds like other English words, the
lower its probability is. If you want to know, this
is called phonotactic probability. And by the way, if you
want to read all the details of the study, I'm
linking our paper at eagleman dot com slash podcast. So
(30:03):
what we found is that the phonotactic probability how likely
different sounds go together. This mapped right onto what we
found for the scores. The nonsense words, which everyone hated,
had the lowest probability of existing as words. They were
the least word like in the sense of all these
(30:25):
sounds ending up together. Now, the aversive words like moist
and slacks and nugget had higher probabilities of those sounds
going together, but these were less probable than the control words,
the words that nobody minded. So the control words had
the highest probability of the sounds going together. So sound
(31:03):
groupings that were improbable mapped onto higher aversion. And then
we looked at a related measure. You can calculate what's
called the neighborhood density for any word. This just tells
you how many words differ from your word by only
one phoneme. So for instance, cat has many neighbors like
(31:25):
sad or bad or bat or can or cow and
so on. Or neighbors of the word urge are earth
and earl and edge and urn and age. You just
change one sound in the word and you're at some
other new word. So some words have lots of neighbors,
but others don't. And so neighborhood density measures how similar
(31:49):
sounding a word is to other words, and we find
the same result here. The nonsense words, on average, had
the fewest neighbors. They had the fewest words that sounded
like them, and people hated these the most. Then you
had the aversive words like moist, and they had some
more neighbors to them. And finally, the control words had
(32:12):
the most neighbors. So if you're a word with fewer
other words that sound like you, you are more unfamiliar.
And again this suggests that unfamiliarity plays a key part
in the experience of aversion. So words with improbable combinations
(32:33):
of sounds that sounded less like other English words, these
were more likely to be unpleasant. Unfamiliarity correlates with aversion.
Now just to wrap this study. I suspect that linguistic familiarity,
like we explored here, is just one important piece of
the word aversion puzzle, because there's a lot of variability
(32:57):
in the data that's not explained fully by familiarity. For
a full explanation, we'd almost certainly have to include the
meaning of the word as well as something about an
individual's prior experience of that particular word. So there's still
plenty to do in terms of understanding who has this
and who doesn't, and surveying speakers in other languages beyond
(33:19):
English to understand about their word a versions. Just as
an example, one Spanish speaker I saw said she has
a horrible aversion to words like socopar, which means to
cover up. She can't stand the word. So we can
find these same principles across languages, and we need to
understand what that tells us. And I think there are
(33:40):
other questions too, like is it only negative emotions? Maybe
certain words trigger really positive emotions, but maybe for some
reason that doesn't get talked about as much. And finally,
my lab and others have been searching for the genes
that underpins synesthesia and the signatures in the brain of
this crosstalk. The question is what do these look like
(34:02):
for word aversion? But what we can already see is
that in some people, certain sounds trigger emotions, and this
seems to be another form of synesthesia, where there's a
blending between regions of the brain that are normally a
little more separate. Now, as I noted at the beginning,
only some fraction of the population experiences word aversion, and
(34:25):
it's hard to estimate that percentage until you do a
careful population study, let's say, testing ten thousand people about it.
But I want to flag something important here, which is
that doing a population study, say on the internet, isn't
totally straightforward, and it has to be done carefully because
people often confuse word aversion for whatever their own pet
(34:49):
peeves are, like what we discussed earlier, what words they
find overused or used mistakenly, or a word that's elitist
or patronizing or whatever. Now, why might people confuse these
things with word aversion, Because, as I've discussed throughout the
Inner Cosmos podcast, it's often really hard to imagine what
(35:13):
it is like to be in someone else's head. And
if you don't know that experience can be different for
different people. It's easy to mistakenly believe that everyone must
be having the same experience that you're having on the inside,
and so we interpret new information by shoving it into
(35:36):
our own model of the world, even when it doesn't
quite fit. In other words, someone tells you that they
feel a certain way, and you say, I know exactly
how you feel. Well, you may or may not. You
can only interpret their story through the lens of your
own experience. So when the study of word aversion first began,
(35:57):
it took a lot of effort to convince people who
didn't have word a version that this was a thing.
Why because they were interpreting the claim through only a
single perspective on the world. As an example, there was
a British guy I saw online who didn't experience word
a version, and so he asserted that this was quote
an American thing that didn't exist in British English. Well,
(36:20):
we now know he's incorrect about that. Many Brits have this,
but he's making the common but fundamental error of assuming
that because he doesn't experience it, British people in general
do not. And I stumbled on several comments about this online,
especially when this all started a decade ago, where people
(36:41):
would say things like word a version is a quote
rare and weird neurotic behavior that's being talked about by
point one percent of women. Because we know these aren't
the numbers. This is another example of our naive internal models,
where we tend to assume that if if we don't
experience something, it's because it doesn't exist and other people
(37:04):
are just making it up. It's just like I talked
about in other episodes about synesthesia or how we visualize things,
like some people imagine a scene like a movie and
others have no particular image at all in their heads.
Or take mental illness. For millennia, the approach to mental
illness was to say, just toughen up, or in other
(37:27):
cases it was we can torture you until you start
acting normally. It took literally thousands of years before people
started to realize that the experience in one person's head
can be different than the experience in their own and
what happened through history happens in the course of our
own lifetime too. A large part of your passage into
(37:51):
maturity is realizing that people can be quite different on
the inside and coming to override the assumption that every
one is having an experience just like yours. So, to
wrap up today's episode, reality is not one size fits all.
Two people can listen to the same words, and for
(38:12):
one it's aversive and for the other it's totally neutral.
It's just like eating cilantro or the feel of wool
against your skin. You can have two humans experiencing the
same event and having very different experiences. The important lesson
to keep in mind here is that if you are
only trying to understand your own reality, you're like a
(38:32):
fish in water trying to describe water. It's impossible to
describe what water is because you've never seen anything other
than that. But when you see a different way that
things can be, that gives you a broader platform from
which to build theories. And that's one of our deepest
goals in neuroscience, to understand how the specific microscopic activity
(38:58):
in your three many pounds of wet, gushy, alien computational
material maps onto the world that you see and enjoy
every day, How the unique activity in your head maps
onto the view that you're looking at right now, the
feel of your clothes on your skin, the sound of
(39:19):
my voice in your ear because for each of us,
reality is a little bit different. Go to Eagleman dot
com slash podcast for more reading and more information. Send
me an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com with
(39:40):
questions or discussion, and I'll be making an episode soon
in which i address those. Until next time, I'm David Eagleman,
signing off from the Inner Cosmos assas
Host
David Eagleman
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