Are Swear Words Good? - with Dr. Emma Byrne | The Empowering Neurologist EP. 64

Well, hello everyone. I'm Dr. David Perlmutter. Welcome to The Empowering Neurologist. Today we're going to talk about an interesting book, Swearing Is Good for You. This is a very, very compelling book that looks at swearing, defines what swearing is, how swearing has changed over time through cultures, and the effects that swearing has on some of our actions in terms of our ability to work as team members, for example, and even our ability to tolerate pain. We will look at swearing in terms of what it's taught us about the brain in terms of brain anatomy, what certain parts of the brain do. It's a very, very interesting perspective. The book is written by Dr. Emma Byrne. Let me tell you about her. She is a scientist, a journalist, a public speaker. Her training in artificial intelligence and computational neuroscience is sparked with a fascination with this very decidedly uncomputational way that our minds work, and certainly exploring Swearing is, is not a big area of neuroscience research. She has been on BBC Radio in an episode of Forethought, and that was actually selected as one of the best of 2013 by the editors of that program. She's an alumnus of the British Science Association Media Fellowship and the BBC Academy's Expert Women Training Program. Her writing credits include appearing in the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Financial Times, and she's made many television and radio appearances in both the UK as well as here in America, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. This book, Swearing Is Good for You, is her first book, and it's really very, very interesting. I'm excited to get on with our interview, so here we go. Hi, David. Dr. Emma Byrne, thank you for joining us today. Again, here is your really interesting book. Why does a person like you study swearing?

Well, that's the thing. My background's actually in artificial intelligence, and I was working out of a computational neuroscience laboratory in London Science Museum, and they have this fantastic thing once a month where they have people in who are over the age of 18 only, and so they open up all the bars and they have them doing interactive experiments. Because my lab was based out of the Science Museum, I had to come up with interesting things to do to these poor members of the public. And the ice bucket experiment that I mentioned fairly early on in there, the one that definitively shows how good swearing is at helping kill pain, is such an easy and elegant experiment to do on members of the public. You get to explain things like experimental control and repeatability and all the rest of it, but all you need to do is have an ice bucket, a stopwatch, and encourage people to swear in public, which isn't actually that difficult. But I realized as we were repeating this experiment experiment, albeit in fairly uncontrolled conditions, because as I said, the bars were open, that there's something paradoxical. Normally the things that we know are good for us, like watching how we eat or watching how much exercise we do, we kind of have to force ourselves to do. Swearing is good for you, and yet we try and force ourselves not to. And so I really wanted to unpack why that was the case.

Well, let us take a step back, and can you help us understand what swearing is. What do we mean when we say swearing? I think we all know swear words, but there's got to be some kind of definition.

That's right. You can't just go with the whole you know it when you hear it definition. That's not really good enough for science. But the problem is that you can't sort of easily hit on an extensional definition of swearing. There isn't a canonical list of swear words. You might think you could go to the dictionary, but dictionaries quite often either don't include swearing or else they have a fairly historical view of what swearing is. Swearing is so mutable, it changes as society changes. And so the best working definition that these papers all seem to centre around is the idea that swearing is language that refers to something that's otherwise taboo. It's the kind of language that you'd think twice about using in company that you're not altogether familiar with. And also, it's the kind of language that causes an emotional response. And the danger there is that the definition becomes slightly circular when you're doing investigations into how emotional swearing is, how much of an emotional impact it can have. But it's the best working definition that we have, is that it's taboo and it's, it's more emotive than the rest of language. And because of that emotive character of it, we see some very unusual things about swearing compared to the rest of language.

I want to take our audience back to the moment or that experiment that you just described, just so it's really very clear. You have a group of people and they, they see how long they can immerse their hand in ice water, and you run, you You run a stopwatch, and first they put their hand in ice water, and then another group, or the same group, whatever, does the same thing, but at the time that their hand is immersed in this painful situation, they are swearing. And it seems that they're able to tolerate the pain longer if they are swearing, right? That's what that was all about. How do you get them to swear? Do you put up a list, or what do you do?

Well, that's the thing. As you say, there has to be some kind of constraint on what swearing they use. We don't put up a list. The person who originally devised this experiment, Dr. Richard Stephens, up in the University of Keele here in the UK, wanted to make sure that the swear word and the neutral word that people used were about equally recallable in their vocabulary. He didn't want there to be a cognition effect that, I don't know, either swearing was easier to say and there was a distractor by having to remember the neutral word, or vice versa. So what he did is he asked them to describe something in front of them, for example, you know, give me 5 words that you would use to describe this table. And then he also asked them for 5 things that they'd say or 5 ways they'd respond if they dropped something on their toe. I usually, in a talk, I usually say, if I were to punch you right now, which is obviously slightly different because you're not just talking about pain there, you're probably talking about fear as well. But you ask people for something, you know, the repertoire of things that they'd say when something painful happens. And then he goes down both of those lists and finds the same entry on the neutral words that corresponds to the first swear word on the other noises that you make when you're in pain. So that helps take care of this kind of recall effect and the idea there's a cognitive loading issue. But also, you're only allowed to use that one word in your— that one neutral word in the neutral trial and that one swear word in your swearing trial. So again, you're controlling for things like how complex the utterances are. He stripped them down to the most simple single-word utterance. And also that, yeah, we do this with the same person twice over and over again, but he also has them plunge their hands in some tepid water in order to make sure it comes back up to a standardized temperature before each.

That's good science.

Yeah, yeah. And obviously randomizing the presentation order is very easy because it's a 2-conditions trial. So you just say, you know, heads or tails. And again, usually in talks I tend to say, you know, which do you think is ruder, head or tails, which is always guaranteed to kind of relax people a bit. And yeah, and I found consistently, even in talks— and again, I stress that my environment is nowhere near as controlled as Dr. Stephens' environment— but even in that kind of informal setting, albeit the people aren't naive subjects anymore, they know the title of my talk and possibly want to prove to me that they're being helpful, but they do tend to withstand pain more while they're swearing. And we also see the other things that Dr. Stephens' research is starting to unpack about the effect on emotions of swearing and about how much richer their emotional expression is, even when they're restricted to just one swear word compared to just one neutral word.

One of the things that you demonstrated and talked about very early in the book was how for team building and camaraderie, swearing seemed to be about the best thing that a group of people could do to enhance their ability to work together. Why might that be?

Yeah, I mean, there are certainly some groups where that is absolutely the case. Bear in mind though that a lot of this research comes from the Antipodes, Australia, Australia and New Zealand, and also the UK and Ireland. And I haven't found any analogous research in the United States. I think there's probably—

There's plenty of swearing here, that's for sure.

I'm sure there's plenty of swearing, but I haven't seen anyone study it.

I mean, all over the news media.

Yes, I certainly noticed that your commander-in-chief used some the other day. But it tends to be places where you have groups of people who have Low sort of regard for the pecking order. So there are certain parts of the UK where you find this, you know, certain classes, particularly the working classes in the US— sorry, particularly the working classes in the United Kingdom, you find that that regard, that disregard for authority is definitely something you want to show to the colleagues who are on the same level as you. And so the most famous case study on this, rather than any kind of randomized controlled trial, is to do with a bunch of New Zealanders who were working in a factory packing And they were a bunch of people that the rest of the company called the Power Rangers, because their ability to perform was just so much better than everyone else's. And so much of it came down to the interpersonal style of their leader, who is pseudonymized as Jeanette in the study. And Jeanette is extremely adept at using swearing. She's very good at using it as an indicator of the depth of her sympathy. And I had this fantastic Kiwi researcher who was explaining to me the difference between a complaint which is where you expect your manager to do something about it, and a whinge, which is where you're just sort of saying, this isn't great, this isn't fun, and I kind of want sympathy, but I don't expect you to fix it. Like, you know, I always get the slow line, is more of a complaint. You're asking to be moved somewhere else. Whereas, it's really dead in here today, is more of a whinge. There's nothing your manager can do about it. And Jeanette was really good at telling the difference between complaints and whinges, and using swearing to say, look, I'm empathizing with how you feel about this. You know, if someone says, oh, this is a real S-E job, that you've given me, it's like, yeah, we all have to do an S-E job from time to time.

S-E, I guess we all know what that means.

Yeah, the excremental full essence of it. There we go. I wasn't sure whether you were—

I think our audience can handle shade. What I wanted to explore was this, and what you've really uncovered doing a lot of great work is the physioanatomical basis for swearing, or perhaps more importantly, our restraint of swearing, as was developed early on with the experience with Phineas Gage, then more recently with interpreting stroke areas and even post-surgical events that have involved the amygdala, for example. So what has your study of swearing allowed us to understand about how the brain works?

Yeah, I mean, I've been fortunate to essentially inherit nearly 200 years now of research about swearing in the brain. And some of it wasn't intended to be research about swearing in the brain. Swearing was just this really useful indicator of a change in someone's behaviour, as in the case of Phineas Gage. But also, as you say, in strokes. We know that swearing has broader and deeper roots, if I may be so informal, than the rest of language. And the reason that I say that is that damage to the left side of the brain, for most right-handed Westerners anyway, is the kind of thing that tends to severely disrupt speech to the point where you can develop what's usually clinically referred to as aphasia, the inability to speak. However, that's— we've known since Victorian times, since a neuroscientist called John Hughlings Jackson, that aphasia clinically doesn't necessarily mean that you've lost the ability to speak altogether. It just means you tend not to use the kind of words that your doctors are comfortable writing in your notes. And that's the really interesting thing about swearing and bad language, is that you look at some of these papers in the field of neuroscience and how circumspect some of the clinicians are about reporting what's actually said. All we know is that it is a swear word, that it's something so taboo they feel it's not possible even to put this in a clinical journal that is dealing with, you know, all kinds of medical case histories that aren't necessarily the most palatable thing, but they won't use a swear word. So my favourite example of this is one particular stroke patient who had this inability to name things that he was shown. He had lost the ability to spontaneously conjure up nouns in response to prompts. So they would show him pictures of things and places and people, and he would try to utter something, but the sounds that came out were not recognizable as pertaining to what he was being shown until they showed him a picture of Ronald Reagan, at which point it does say that he responded with a stream of profanity that was—

Oh my gosh. You talk about that in the book, actually.

Yeah, but unfortunately what that profanity was is lost to history because they didn't feel it was appropriate to record the exact words, whereas they will tell us the exact sounds that he'd made in trying to utter other things. So there's this kind of odd, circumspect approach to swearing. So even though these neuroscientists are recognizing that swearing is very indicative of some communication that this person wishes to convey, that they're not actually recording what it is that they wanted to convey. And I think that's kind of unfortunate, because it says that the things we communicate with our swearing vocabulary are somehow not worthy of note, whereas I think that's absolutely the wrong way around. The things we use our swearing vocabulary for are usually the things that we feel most passionate about,

Well, swear words are very, very powerful parts of language that carry with them, you know, a lot of meaning that gets to people's, you know, feeling of right and wrong and good and bad. And it's, you know, they're pervasive, as you well described in the book, throughout all cultures and languages. And you did a really interesting job, great job, talking about how swearing changes over time, how I think you said saying Jesus Christ 150 years ago, I don't know what would happen. You probably land in jail or something, but now things have changed. That said, let me get back to I think the physiology here if we could, and that is that you identified that the amygdala seems to be playing a pivotal role in regulating our ability to to suppress swearing. And I want to take that also into Tourette's and what we've learned about that.

Sure. The research that's in— sorry, the research that indicates a role for the amygdala is really interesting because it's far from straightforward. It seems that the amygdala isn't just a simple sort of traffic light, a kind of stop-go system for swearing, but it does do something— or they do do something, because there's one on either side— they do do something in humans that allows us to regulate our emotions To understand when certain emotions are appropriate, and sometimes to let go of things that ordinarily we might not feel able to express. So you mentioned the case studies that were to do with people who were undergoing brain surgery, and this is things that happened actually during brain surgery, because as you know, you don't want to impact any tissue that's playing a really important role. So often neurosurgeons, as they're— as they are, you know, taking away parts of the brain, they will stimulate things around the margins to see exactly what it is that they are operating on, because everybody's neurophysiology is slightly different. And we know that if you stimulate the amygdala during surgery, that patients will quite often respond with this stream of extremely well-formed and extremely fluent swearing that surprises even the patient, that they haven't felt the usual of emotional buildup or impetus that causes swearing to burst forth, just that it happens, which is very unusual because we know that swearing ordinarily requires a huge amount of emotional input in order to be created. And the reason we know that is that people who have strokes on the right side of the brain tend to lose their ability to understand or to even experience emotions. They become oddly detached. They're generally described as, by their physicians, They lose the ability to understand jokes or to predict when swearing might be appropriate. So usually without that kind of emotional input to drive the desire to swear and the understanding of what swearing might be appropriate, swearing just doesn't happen. But this direct stimulus to the amygdala in isolation seems to be enough to allow swearing to come about. But you mentioned— oh, sorry.

Tourette's. So does that— should segue to Tourette's syndrome. And the, you know, the outbursts of swear words that may accompany that.

So possibly in Tourette's there's something slightly different going on, and there's a bunch of things to unpack in this, not least because for a long time we were barking up the wrong tree with Tourette's. It was thought to be a psychological disorder for a very long time, and then neuroscientists started to unpack the role of dopamine. And if you study people with Tourette's syndrome and you give them an experimental setup in which you are differentially rewarded for remembering certain stimuli, these usually random stimuli of sort of strings of 5 characters, for example. And you say one of them, you know, you're told, here are 10 stimuli. For 5 of them, every time you get one right, you're going to get a cent. Every time you get these other 5 right, you're going to get a dollar. For people who are neurotypical, people who don't have any kind of dopamine processing dysfunction, including Tourette's, but also things like OCD, you tend to get slightly better on the ones with higher reward, but it's not super significant. But with people with Tourette's and other dopamine disorders, they get really good at the ones with a very high reward. So it seems that there is something in the physiologic— sorry, in the physiology, in the neurophysiology of Tourette's that is is processing dopamine in a way that the rest of us don't normally experience. And this leads to all kinds of tickish behaviors, behaviors that feel so rewarding, that cause that sensation of dopamine docking with these particular neuroreceptors that feels so good, even when this person themselves, the, the patient, the individual, knows that it's And only about 25% of people with Tourette's actually do end up swearing. By far the majority of people with Tourette's say that the worst tics that afflict them are the physical ones because of the muscle damage that they cause, or else it's things like the social exclusion that they get. So many kids with Tourette's, and it is usually kids who start suffering, are excluded from social activities or their schooling and have these impacts for the rest of their life long after Tourette's syndrome has cleared up. And sometimes it's it's not swearing, but some other form of taboo language, like the young man who said that he used to get the very strong impulse to yell his ex's name during sexual intercourse with his current partner. Oh, I'm so sorry. It's reminding me that I should leave work to pick up my daughter, but I came home early. Sorry. I'll wind back a bit. Yeah, so swearing isn't necessarily the only type of taboo language that people experience during Tourette's syndrome when they have tics. Quite often, it's something otherwise unacceptable, like the young man who said that he had this urge to shout out the name of his ex in front of his girlfriend when they were having sex, that something has happened in the reward system of the brain that means that things that are otherwise inappropriate just feel right to do, that it's impossible, or at least was thought to be impossible, to suppress those urges. But there's a new form of behavioural therapy that's looking at at using the plasticity of these people's brains, again, usually adolescents, and rewarding them for diverting their tics, you know, carrying out some kind of behavior that is inconsistent with the tic. So if it's hair pulling, saying, you know, try and clap your hands instead of pulling your hair, and asking parents and teachers to minimize the amount of stress that those kids feel, because quite often stress causes more ticking as well. And the great thing about that is that if you can make it easier For these kids with Tourette's to cope with their tics or to divert their tics without giving them something that interrupts the dopamine action in their brain, you allow them to have a much more normal adolescence. Because if you're basically drugging these kids so that they don't feel the kinds of rewards that teenagers normally feel, they're missing out on something really important. And that's not to say, you know, throw away your medication. That medication does an awful lot. It helps a lot for an awful lot of young people with Tourette's. It helps them, you know, prevents them from having physical pain, you know, not just discomfort, physical pain from their tics. But one of the things that I'm really passionate about, having done the research for that chapter, is that it seems there's a component of our treatment of Tourette's that is about managing the discomfort of non-sufferers rather than sufferers. That we say, you know, I'm uncomfortable. I'm uncomfortable with that language that you're using, or I'm uncomfortable with that behavior that I'm seeing you demonstrate. My emotions feel too heavy for me to deal with, so I'm going to help you not do this thing that makes me feel bad. Whereas this, this new behavioral intervention feels a bit more patient-centered. But I'm far from an expert in the treatment of Tourette's. But as I was doing reading up—

I think you bring up a very, uh, I think you make a good point in your discussion, not just about Tourette's, but about how ostracized these young people become in terms of their social spheres, and that can persevere into adulthood, at least in terms of their sense of self. Mm-hmm. And I mention that because it is known that the stimulant medications that are used to treat ADHD associated in a small number of cases with bringing on Tourette syndrome, with one report appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Association describing permanent Tourette's as a consequence of being treated with these stimulant-type medications that are really pervasive here in the States, and I think in England as well, they're very readily used. So, you know, we want to practice under the doctrine of above all, do no harm. That said, your discussion of dopamine in the reward circuits brings to mind another of our interviews recently with Dr. Robert Lustig, which is talking about his book, The Hacking of the American Mind, talking about this dopamine-seeking behavior, short-term satisfaction behavior that is related to things Things like our dietary choices, buying certain things, addiction to various activities, etc. So I think it kind of amplifies this notion of really, in this case with Tourette's, perhaps seeking out on an unconscious level that satisfaction driven by dopamine. And it's— I wasn't totally expecting you to go there, and it's very interesting that you did because it fills in, I think, a very important part of understanding it At least for me. I'd like to move on to— you had a discussion at the end of the book about the perhaps evolutionary advantage of having swearing as a part of language, which I think was really very interesting. So, can you take us through that?

Yeah, it's certainly the place where I get the most speculative. I wouldn't say it's full-on science fiction.

You're all into that. Why not?

Yeah. But because we can't rerun our own evolution, there are a bunch of things that are interesting just-so stories about the way that we came to be. But when you look at the role that swearing plays in groups and as a way of forestalling violence, for example, so I use the example of 2 hunter-gatherer tribes where Zag in one of the tribes has done something utterly idiotic during That morning's, you know, sort of mammoth hunt and has let the mammoth get away. And the only way for his fellow hunters or her fellow hunters is to basically start, you know, bashing him around the head, so teach him a lesson he'll never forget. But that leaves him incapable of hunting the next day. You know, he certainly physically internalized that he's done a bad thing, but it takes a long time to recover from, you know, having a good kicking. Whereas in another tribe, if they've learned to be able to hurl this kind of word magic that is emotionally painful but not physically damaging, then you internalize that lesson. You know that you've been, you know, called a stupid whatever. I'm not sure what is taboo in early man's life, you know. Mm-hmm. You're one of those, like, stupid fire users from in the other valley. There would have been something taboo at some point, and that, that would have been painful enough that this person remembers that their behavior has to change, but they're physically capable capable of going out and operating as part of the group the next day. But it's untestable, you know, it's completely untestable.

Well, you know, you write a book, you're entitled to speculate. I sure do. And I, you know, you're allowed to extrapolate and not always have to connect existing dots. But that said, we've all been the recipient of castigation in the form of swear words, and we remember those, those events are imprinted upon upon us. And I think, you know, it didn't do any physical harm, so we can still help out with the hunt and the gather. But I think it was very interesting that you talked about that. I mean, I think swear words are clearly our most impactful words in our language. There's no other word that if you suddenly hear it in a certain situation, no other type of words that's going to have that much impact. I want to close just with— not necessarily this is a great closing spot, but I just wanna make sure we cover the idea that the role of gender in the use of swear words. I thought that was kind of interesting as well.

Yeah, it's a great study from the United States which is about 15 years old now and possibly due for rerunning, but I think that's just me sort of wishful thinking on my part that anything might have changed. But a chap called Dr. Robert O'Neill from the University of Louisiana sent out a bunch of questionnaires with the same set of swearing phrases written down in them. But he said, you know, this one comes from, toss a coin, a chap by the name of Gerald or something. In fact, I'm not sure he even used identifying names. I think it was literally, you know, this is a man saying this, this is a woman saying that. And asked people to rate various things about the speaker. So, how offensive they found that particular bit of speech, but also, whether they thought the speaker was more or less attractive, or more or less reliable, or more or less powerful, or in control. And bear in mind that the genders were randomized. He hadn't subconsciously picked, you know, sort of stronger swearing for women and weaker swearing for men. It's completely randomized. And each condition was tested and found that people invariably, and those who gave their gender in the responses as male or female, that male or female alike, do say that when women swear, they're considered less attractive. The swearing's considered more offensive. We're considered less powerful or in control. Whereas for male swearers using exactly the same phrases, they don't suffer any kind of attractiveness deficit and can even be seen as being more powerful or more purposeful. So there is this extreme double standard that comes into how we perceive swearing depending on the gender of the person who's doing it. But the thing is, when you look back into history, and this is where, you know, that sort of wonderful interdisciplinary thing that happens when you go out on book tours and you find yourself sitting with a historian. I was working with a guy called John Gallagher who used to be at Trinity in Dublin and is now at Leeds, I think, here in the UK, and he was telling me about his study of swearing in the Middle Ages. And here in Britain, men and women were equally lauded for their ability to come up with an utterly foul and inventive put-down. It was essentially part of the early performing arts industry. You know, you would get patrons in the court who would pay you for your ability to do something called flighting, you know, just these elaborate flights of profanity and invective. And women equally celebrated for that. But around Shakespeare's time, there's a chap called Richard Allestree. He writes a book called The Lady's Calling that basically says that women swearing is an act that is so aberrant, it's the worst thing that God can hear. There's no sound more offensive to God than the oath in the mouth of a woman, which, considering what else is going on in the world, you know, makes God seem like he's sort of focusing on the wrong things there. Not to second-guess the Almighty, but that really changed things. And you see this attitude towards women swearing just absolutely alters throughout that time, kind of peaks around the Victorians, and has finally been tailing off a bit. But this, we still kind of feel the aftershocks in which a woman swearing is a gender transgressive act. And one of the researchers that I speak to talks about gender transgressive acts and the ways we code our behaviour other people to see whether or not we're particularly male or female, whether it's what you choose to wear, or how you choose to sit, or how much you gesture with your hands. And when you do corpus studies of language, there are certain words that, you know, not even swear words, but words like lovely and delightful and superb that definitely fit in female speech. Whereas the F-word, if you count the number of uses of the F-word, that it's most likely to indicate that it's a chap that's speaking. If you have no idea of anything else about the speaker, but just the number of F-words that they've used, the higher it is, the more likely it is that it's a man, because of this double standard. But we've also found that we were laboring under a misapprehension about women not swearing for a very long time. And that's because a lot of the people doing the interviewing, in the early part of the 20th century at least, were male psychologists, and that women tend not to swear in front of men, particularly men with power. But if you look back at women's writing and the way that they communicated with each other, that swearing had never gone away, and that talk about taboo subjects had never gone away, particularly when it comes to the entire field of obstetrics, which, let's face it, covers an awful lot of fairly blunt things. And we know as well that the first person to use undashed, unasterisked swear words in a novel, or foul language in a novel, was Currer Bell, otherwise known as Charlotte Brontë. It was a female author who first wanted to put these things in full because she said, there is no point to hiding these things. All you do is a disservice to the character that you're representing because you're trying to tell take away the emotional impact of the language that they would use. So this idea that somehow women are naive about swearing or don't use swearing or shouldn't use swearing is kind of an invention that's only about 300, 400 years old, but it hasn't shown any signs of going away yet.

Well, I mean, even in our conversation, we're not saying certain words because they are bad words. We're saying the F-word, the S-word, and I Is it true that even Shakespeare's works were redacted in terms of their vulgarity?

They were. This is the brilliant thing about having different editions of the plays in print. So the first edition has words like z'blood, which is short for God's blood, and z'wounds, which is short for God's wounds. And then the Master of the Revels decides that these words should not be said on stage, and so the second printing has them all redacted. They have vanished, and it's only when scholars later on sort of put these side by side and said, "Oh, oh, we shouldn't." You know, this second edition isn't the original Shakespeare. This first edition is the original Shakespeare. It's kind of like the Tarantino director's cut of something. It's like this is what he really wanted to say before the censors got into it. And so now we tend to see those original swear words or you know profanities put. But there is this tendency to pronounce wounds as zounds because that original link with the idea that you are blaspheming on God's wounds from the crucifix has lost its power and its meaning. There is no cultural sense in which we understand, here in Britain anyway, the stigmata to be something taboo and powerful. But at the time, They were considered, you know, so powerful that you had to regulate their use, which is a really good sign of both that we've always had this concern about using words that are taboo in public and a desire to kind of control them because we have an awareness that, you know, like a powerful painkiller, that the poison is in the dose and that you kind of want to keep them safe in some ways. But also they But what constitutes swearing definitely changes over time, that I could yell zooms at the top of my voice at the tube station, and while I would get some odd looks, I would not be thrown in the tower for it.

Yeah, washing a kid's mouth out with soap, you know, to purge the mouth of dirt if he or she says a bad word. I remember that was pretty popular when I was coming up. Well, listen, thank you for taking your time and joining us today. I know you pushed through the cough and the sore throat, and you did a great job. So again, this is a really, really interesting book. I'm so glad that you wrote it and you shared it with us. I mean, you know, I came to the book from, I think, the neuroscience perspective, but there's a lot in there for everybody. So thank you again.

Thank you very much for having me on.

Okay, all the best.

Have a great day.

Well, that was an interesting interview. We certainly all have our conceptions about what swearing is and the taboos associated with using certain words, but how interesting that a neuroscientist has dedicated herself to studying swearing, has learned so much about it from a historical perspective, a cultural perspective, but I think more importantly And more importantly for our perspective, what we learn about the function of the brain, how certain areas of the brain when they are damaged allow the person or create a scenario where the person will swear more. What an interesting exploration of the reward circuits that may be involved in Tourette syndrome as well. So again, here is the book, Swearing Is Good for You, by Dr. Emma Byrne. Very interesting book. I urge you to take a look at it. Thank you for joining our program. Hope to see you soon. I'm Dr. David Perlmutter. Bye for now. Thank you.