The Stuff of Thought | Steven Pinker | Talks at Google

Douglas.

I'm Douglas Merrill. I'm a VP of Engineering here at Google. And as a side note, I have a PhD in cognitive science. In my dissertation, I spend about a chapter and a half fairly vituperatively citing you and saying why I think you're wrong. So, for the record, every time Stephen and I have argued, he's been right. And I'm sure it was the case this time as well. Stephen is the Johnston family professor of psychology at Harvard, I believe. Is that roughly correct? He recently devolved. He was at MIT for many years, but that's okay. The commute's shorter. I asked Stephen what he wanted me to say, if anything in particular, and he wants me to definitely call out two things. One, well, actually, Ann wanted me to call out one thing, which is that he was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of all time, which I find fairly creepy. But Stephen wanted me to mention that he appeared on Colbert and didn't suck. And with that, it's a great, great, great honor to introduce one of the fathers of the field of actually understanding how human minds work, Steven Pinker.

Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure and honor to be here. This old woodcut of the story of the blind men and the elephant is a reminder that any complex subject can be studied in many ways. And that is certainly true for a subject as complex as human nature. Anthropology can study universal patterns of belief and behavior across the world's societies, as well as the ways in which they differ. Biology can document how the process of evolution selected the genes that help to wire the brain. Psychology, my own field, can get people to disclose their foibles in laboratory studies. And even fiction can illuminate human nature by showing the universal themes and plots that obsess people in their myths and stories. This afternoon, I'm going to give you the view from language, what kind of insight we can gain into thought, emotion and social relations from words and how we use them. I'll talk about grammar as a window into thought, swearing as a window into emotion, and innuendo as a window into social relationships. And in each case, I'll start with a puzzle in language. Show how it reveals a much deeper feature of the human mind using specific examples from English, the language with which all of us are familiar. But examples that have close counterparts in many languages and that follow an overall logic that can be found in all languages. So let's begin with language as a window into thought. And the puzzle I will start off with comes from A delightful book by Richard Lederer called Crazy English, which has the following passage. You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language where a house can burn up as it burns down, and in which you fill in a form by filling it out. Why is it called after dark when it is really after light? Things that we claim are underwater and underground are surrounded by, not under, the water and ground. So the first puzzle why do languages talk about the physical world in such crazy ways? And the answer, I'm going to suggest is that there is a theory of physics embedded in our language. A concept of space in our prepositions, a concept of matter in our nouns, a concept of time in our tenses, and a concept of causality in our verbs. That understanding the intuitive physics in language helps to explain not just the quirks of language itself, but the mental models that humans use to make sense of their lives. So let's start off with space. How do we locate an object relative to a place, a reference location or coordinate frame? Well, you can imagine an ideal hypothetical system of prepositions where every preposition was composed of six syllables, one each for distance in the up, down, left, right and front, back direction, and then one each for the angle of pitch, roll and yawn. Needless to say, no language uses this system. Instead, location is digitized. Languages make distinctions like near versus far, on versus off, in versus out, on versus under. Which is why Groucho could say, if I held you any closer, I'd be on the other side of you. Also, scale is relative. You can use the same spatial term across to refer to an ant walking across a hand or a bus driving across the country. And the interpretation of the word there will differ in a sentence like put it there depending on whether the person uttering it is a crane operator or a brain surgeon. Also, shape is schematic. In reality, all objects are three dimensional arrangements of matter, but language idealizes them as essentially one dimensional, two dimensional or three dimensional. So we've got a line, which of course is one dimensional, but also a road, which is conceived of as one dimensional with a little width fleshing it out, and a beam, which is also conceived as one dimensional but with a finite thickness fleshing it out. In contrast, we've got a surface which is two dimensional or a slab, also construed as two dimensional with some finite thickness. This idealized geometry governs our use of prepositions. So, for example, the preposition along requires an essentially one dimensional object. You can say the ant walked along the line or along the road or along the beam, but not the ant walked along the plate or along the ball, which sounds a little anomalous. It governs the way we apply nouns to shapes. So we don't refer to a wire as a cylinder, just a long skinny cylinder, nor a CD as a cylinder, a short, fat one, even though, geometrically speaking, that's what they are. But because we ignore certain dimensions as insubstantial and idealize the shape as one of the remaining dimensions, and I think it goes into our overall sense of shape, what we conceive of as similar to. To what else? As when a child says, I don't want the little crayon box. I want the box that looks like an audience. That is not the eight crayon box of Crayola, but the 64 crayon box, where the crayons are arranged in pitched rows like the balcony of an auditorium. A fourth quirk is that the boundaries of objects are treated like objects themselves. And this is something you may have heard from Ray Jackendoff, my colleague, who I understood spoke here recently. We have words like edge which refer to the 1D boundary of a 2D surface. And so we can say the ant walked along the edge of the plate, even if we can't say the ant walked along the plate. Or a word like end, which is the boundary either of a 1D ribbon or a 2D beam, as long as it's essentially 1D. And you can even cut the end off a ribbon, which, geometrically speaking, ought to be impossible. But we conceive of the end as if it was an object itself. That explains the mystery of why we say underwater and underground when the thing is surrounded by water or ground. It's because the word water or ground can Refer to the 2D surface of the 3D volume, not just the 3D volume itself. And you can be under that surface. So why is the language of space so crazy? Well, I think the main reason is that prepositions divide up space into regions with different causal consequences. And the clearest illustration of that comes from a story that I clipped out of the Boston Globe a few years ago. Woman rescued from frozen pond dies. A woman who fell through thin ice Sunday and was underwater for 90 minutes died yesterday. The Lincoln Fire Department said a miscommunication between the caller who reported the accident and the dispatcher significantly delayed her rescue. The rescue workers believed that a woman had fallen on the ice, not through it, and that left the rescuers combing the woods to find the scene of the accident. So that digital Distinction between on and through in this case was literally a matter of life and death, even though it involved just a of feet in analog space. Let me turn to substance and language. Language distinguishes stuff from things. Indeed, language taxonomizes matter into four categories. There are countable things, as in an apple, masses, as in much applesauce, plurals, as in many apples and collections, as in a dozen apples. These aren't so much different kinds of matter as different frames or attitudes in looking at matter, which is why we can look at the same mass of little rocks and think of it either as pebbles, a collection of individuals, or as gravel and amorphous stuff. And why we have the cliche about the person who can't see the forest for the trees in crazy English letter asks, why does a man with hair on his head have more hair than a man with hairs on his head? Why is the language of substance so crazy? Well, words for matter allow people to agree on how to package and quantify the continuous material world. And an obvious context in which we see that is at the supermarket, where chunks of matter have to be transacted and they can be priced per item, which is what a count noun does, by weight, which is what a mass noun does, or by the dozen, which is what a collective noun does. And in fact, that same mindset that we apply to packaging matter in the physical world, we also apply to abstract concepts. So just as we have a distinction between pebbles and gravel, we have a distinction between many opinions as if they were discrete objects, and much advice as if it was an amorphous mass. We do the same thing to happenings in time. We package the flow of experience in the same way that we package the continuum of matter. For example, let's say, I would ask you, how many events took place on the morning of 911 in New York City? One answer is there was one event because a single plan was executed. You can demarcate events by the realization of a plan. Another answer is two. Because two buildings were destroyed, you can demarcate time by salient physical events. This might seem like the height of pointless semantic nitpicking or hairsplitting, but in fact it is a question with consequences. Because the leaseholder for the World Trade center had an insurance policy that entitled him to $3.5 billion per destructive event. If 911 comprised one event, he stood to gain 3.5 billion. If it comprised two events, he stood to gain 7 billion. And in a number of court cases tied up for many years, the lawyers debated this issue in semantics. So if anyone says how much is a semantic distinction worth? The answer is $3.5 billion. Well, this brings me to the language of time. And this illustration reminds us that time, in many ways is conceived like space, and happenings are conceived like matter, as if there's a kind of time stuff that could be chopped into the equivalent of objects, except we call them events. We see this in the many spatial metaphors for time, like the deadline is coming or we're approaching the dead. We see it in kind of errors that children make, like can I have any reading behind the dinner, that is after the dinner, as if events were stretched out in front of us. And we see it in the semantics of verb tense. Now, verb tense in many ways follows a semantics that is parallel to the semantics of space and matter. In the case of prepositions and nouns, first time is digitized, and second time is relative. That is, no language has tenses for precise intervals of time like an hour, nor for locations in time like November 7, 2007. Instead, location in time is trichotomized in English into three regions defined relative to the moment of speaking. An event can be located in the specious present, an interval of about three seconds in which we don't make temporal distinctions. It's the basic unit of nowness. This is. The specious present is a term from William James, and it refers to an interval of time that embraces a deliberate action, like a handshake, a quick decision, like how long you alight on a channel while channel surfing and decide whether to click again, to the decay of unrehearsed short term memory, to a line of poetry and to a musical motif like the opening notes of Beethoven's fifth, which we don't pursue, perceive as just one note, one note, one note, but rather as a coherent motif. Then there's the past stretching backwards indefinitely. So every event from four seconds ago back to the Big Bang is treated as identical by the English language, which is why Groucho could say, I've had a wonderful evening, but this wasn't it. And then there's the future until eternity. That is everything from four seconds from now until the heat death of the universe, all lumped together. There are not only locations in time, what I've just referred to, but shapes in time, what linguists call aspect, that is how a happening begins, unfolds and ends. Shape in time, like shape in space, is treated schematically. We conceive of some happenings as amorphously spread out in time without any crisp beginning or end, such as the Verb to shake. We conceive of other events as momentaneous or punctate, such as to swat a fly. And then still other events, like to cross the street, have no crisp beginning, but are terminated until some goal has been achieved. In this case, you get to the other side. Now, the stretches of time that are defined by verbs can also be mentally packaged in the same way that we can take a noun, beer, which just refers to the stuff generically, and then package it in a unit by use of the word one, as in one beer, turn a mass noun into a count noun. You can take an amorphous stretch of time like shake it, and with the use of a particle like out, turn it into a. An accomplishment that ends at a defined boundary, as in shake it up, that is, shake it until up to completion. Likewise, we can take ring it, which is indefinite in terms of when it ends, and give it an endpoint with the particle out, and say wring it out, that is, until it's dry. And that is why a house can burn up as it burns down, and you can fill in a form by filling it out. Finally, the boundary of an event can be treated like an event itself, just as with space, Just as I can cut off the end of a ribbon, which is geometrically impossible, I can start the end of my talk, which is temporally impossible. If you think of end as simply the instant of termination, why is it called after dark when it is really after light? Well, dark refers not just to the interval of darkness, but to the boundary of the interval of darkness. And it's exactly isomorphic to why in the language of space, we can say underwater when the thing is surrounded by water. Why is the language of time so crazy? Well, we identify locations in time coarsely because stretches of time relative to the moment of speaking have different consequences for knowledge and action. And a fancy, schmancy way of putting it would be that there's a bit of metaphysics and epistemology that's packed into our tense system. It's not purely a chronological concept. In particular, the present tense corresponds to our own consciousness, to what you can experience as you're alive and awake and aware and are registering your own consciousness. The past is not just an interval in time, but that which is thought to be knowable and factual and unchangeable, as in a report on the Scott Peterson murder case as it was unfolding, where investigators noted that Peterson used the past tense when referring to his wife and unborn son before their bodies were found. Abruptly correcting himself, his use of the past tense betrayed his knowledge of what he knew had taken place while he was testifying the future. Conversely, we conceive of as not just any old stretch of time, but that which is unknowable, hypothetical and willable, as when Winston Churchill said, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender. It's deliberately ambiguous whether he was simply making a prediction as to what would happen on a future date or whether he was making a declaration of resolve and will. Those two can't be distinguished, and the future tense in English and many other languages systematically conflates them. Finally, let me turn to causality in language, where the model of causality in our verbs can be summarized in this diagram. That is, an actor directly impinges on an entity, making it move or change. The psychologist Philip Wolf has done a simple experiment to show how this works. He had computer animations. In one case, Sarah grabbed a doorknob and physically swung the door open. In the other case, she opened the window and a breeze blew the door open. If you ask people, did Sarah cause the door to open? In both cases, people say yes. If you then express the causality inside the verb by saying, did Sarah open the door? Then in the case where she manhandled the door, they say yes. In the case where it was more circuitous, they say no. Why is the language of causality so crazy? Well, directly caused events are the ones that are most likely to be foreseeable and intended, hence those for which we can hold people responsible. And a nice illustration of that comes from an episode in American history in 1881, which shows that when the directness of causation is fuzzy, so is our sense of moral and legal responsibility. President James Garfield was waiting for a train in a Baltimore station, and Charles Guiteau, stalking him, fired two shots into him. Now, the bullets missed his major organs and arteries, and his wound needn't have been fatal. Even in Garfield's time, however, he was subjected to the harebrained medical practices of the day, which included probing his wound with unwashed hands and feeding him through his rectum instead of through his mouth. So he wasted away on his deathbed for three months before finally succumbing of infection and starvation. At the assassin's murder trial, he said, the assassin said, the doctors killed him. I just shot him. The jury was unpersuaded and Guiteau hanged. But nonetheless, this is another illustration of the life and death Consequences of the semantics of a verb. So, to sum up language as a window into cognition, there's a theory of physics embedded in our language. A conception of space in terms of places and objects and qualitative relationships, a conception of matter in terms of stuff and things stretched along one, two or three dimensions, a conception of time in terms of processes and events located and stretched along a single dimension, and a conception of causality in terms of the direct impingement of an actor upon an entity. This way of construing reality differs from real physics, but it corresponds to human goals and purposes, the causal texture of the environment, what is knowable, factual and willable, to ways of packaging and measuring our experience, and to ways of assigning responsibility for events. Let me now turn to part two. Language is a window into emotion. And again, I'll begin with a puzzle of language. Four years ago, the Golden Globe Awards were broadcast on live network television on NBC. And accepting an award on behalf of the rock group U2, its leader Bono said in accepting the award, this is really, really fucking brilliant. Now the switchboards lit up like a Christmas tree. The case eventually landed up on the desk of the fcc, which had to decide whether to find the network for failing to bleep out the offending word. And somewhat surprisingly, the FCC chose not to fine NBC, saying that their regulations defined indecency as, quote, material that describes or depicts sexual or excretory organs or activities and that the fucking and fucking brilliant is, quote, an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation. Well, cultural conservatives were enraged, and there were a number of bills filed in Congress to close that loophole, of which my favorite is House Resolution 3687, the Clean Airways act, which I will now read in its effect entirety. You can, you. You can look it up, be it enacted by the Senate and House and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled that section 1464 of title 18, United States Code, is amended one, by inserting a before whoever, and two, the term profane used with respect to language includes the words shit, piss, fuck, cunt, asshole, and the phrases cocksucker, motherfucker and asshole compound use, including hyphenated compounds of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases, including verb, adjective, gerund, participle and infinitive forms. Unfortunately, the fucking and fucking brilliant is an adverb, and that's the one part of speech that he forgot to include on the list. So grammar matters. Linguistics is important, and the question is, why do people get so upset about certain words? It's not as if anyone hasn't heard them. And indeed, words for sex and excretion have been the main legal battleground of free speech in the past century. There's a paradox. You can turn on late night television and watch Leno or Letterman or Stewart, call George Bush a moron or a liar, and they don't have to worry about getting their tongues cut out or being burned at the stake or worse. But if they were to use particular words to refer to excretion or sexuality, the network would be subject to ruinous finds. So what's going on there? Well, that brings us to the language of swearing. And I'll begin with the cognitive neuroscience of swearing. That is, how is the brain engaged when people use or hear a taboo word? The main generalization is that taboo words activate brain areas associated with negative emotion. They seem to be registered more in the right hemisphere, which has independently been connected with negative emotion in production. They seem to involve the basal ganglia. That's the area that is overactive in Tourette's syndrome, for example, the basal ganglia being complex networks of ganglia buried deep in both halves of the brain that are involved in packaging sequences of behavior in perception. They seem to involve the amygdala, two small almond shaped organs, also evolutionarily quite ancient, buried deep within the brain. Also, taboo words are processed involuntarily. You can't help but hear a taboo word with all of its emotional baggage. And the way that psychologists demonstrate that something is involuntary is to use the Stroop test, a phenomenon that is familiar to any psychology undergraduate and that has been the subject of more than 4,000 scientific papers. So the test is simple. You simply have to name the color in which a series of words is printed. We'll try it right now. I'll give you a list of words. With each word, simply name the color in which it's printed, ignoring what the word says. Okay, we'll start off red. Black. Easy. Okay, now try it again. Same instruction. Name the color in which the word is printed. Much, much harder. The explanation is that to a literate adult, reading is automatic. You can't process a written word as a squiggle. Even if you try to, the meaning always gets through, despite your best intentions. And here's a third version of the Stroop test I mentioned. There were 5,000 papers on it. My favorite comes from a psychologist named Don Mackay at ucla. And again, the instruction is identical, just Name the color in which the word is printed. Black. People are slowed down on this version of the Stroop test almost as much as when the word is printed in a competing color. So the essence of swearing is using language as a kind of weapon to form force a listener to think an unpleasant or at least an emotionally charged thought, exploiting the automatic nature of speech or printed word recognition. Well, this then breaks down the problem of swearing into two problems. What kinds of concepts trigger negative emotions? And why would a speaker want to trigger a negative emotion in his listeners? Well, let's start with the contents of swearing. Anyone who speaks more than one language knows that taboo words differ from language to language. If you translate the curses of one language into another, the results can often be comical. Nonetheless, there are certain common patterns, certain things that supply the meanings of taboo words across all cultures. There's the supernatural, as in our own damn hell and Jesus Christ, which nowadays are fairly mild taboo words. But they continue to be more potent in religious societies, especially Catholic ones. For example, where I grew up in Quebec, in the version of French spoken there, when you stub your toe, you say dam chalice or dam tabernacle. And this involves the emotions of awe and fear at the supernatural and the trappings of deities. There are bodily effluvia and organs, which are familiar sources of taboo words in English. It's not surprising that people would have an emotional reaction to bodily effluvia, because epidemiologists tell us that they are major vectors of disease. There are many parasitic and infectious diseases that are spread by bodily fluids. We have evolved an emotion to defend ourselves against this root of disease transmission, namely the emotion of disgust. There are in many languages taboo words for disease, death, danger and infirmity. In older periods of English, we have the curse apox on you or apocalypse plague on both your houses, from Romeo and Juliet. In Yiddish, you can curse by shouting out hilaria, cholera. And even in contemporary English, there's a bit of taboo that surrounds the word for our most dreaded malady, cancer. And one often reads in an obituary of someone passing away from a long illness. Both the passing away and the long illness are ways of show that there's some taboo status to the words die and cancer. And this involves the emotion of dread of death and disease. There is, of course, sexuality, as in some of our most obscene taboo words. And when people hear this, their first reaction is, but why should thoughts about sex be associated with negative emotions? Isn't sex between consenting adults a form of good, clean fun? Well, not in the full sweep of human experience, where sexuality can also be associated with exploitation, illegitimacy, incest, jealousy, spousal abuse, cuckoldry, desertion, child abuse, feuding, rape. Sex is an emotionally fraught activity, and it's not surprising that people should continue to have strong emotions surrounding it, which we can call revulsion at sexual depravity. Then there are words for disfavored people in groups, including the most taboo word in contemporary respectable American English, the word so incendiary that you can't even mention it. You have to use a word to refer to the word that is the n word. And the words for minorities, for infidels, for cripples, for enemies, for subordinated peoples are often taboo in English, not just in many languages. I should say, in English, we have not only nigger, but also various other racial epithets. And that, of course, invokes the emotions of hatred and contempt. Okay, so if those are the kinds of negative thoughts that people inflict on one another through language, why would they want to? What is the motive for this kind of verbal aggression? Well, there are at least five ways to swear, probably more, but five ways in which people deploy this weapon, beginning with dysphemistic swearing. What does that mean? The difference between, say, shit and feces or fuck and copulate. Now, you all know what a euphemism is. The logic behind a euphemism is we have to talk about this for a specific purpose, but let's avoid thinking about how awful it is. The logic of a dysphemism is exactly the opposite. It's I want you to think about how awful this is, and the English language gives you the means of doing either. A good illustration is in the 34 euphemisms for feces. Now, people don't like to think about feces any more than they like to smell it or touch it. Nonetheless, we are incarnate beings for whom feces is a part of life, and you can't get through life without at least some occasions in which you're forced to refer to the stuff. The solution is to have a specialized vocabulary, each one of which is specific to the need to discuss feces for a specific purpose in a particular context. So we've got generic terms like waste, fecal matter and filth. Formal terms, often from Latin, like feces and excrement, Terms that you use with children, like poop and doo doo, Terms that you use to adults about children, like soil and dirt, Terms in a medical context like stool and bowel movement many terms that you have to use in connection with animals, depending on whether you're referring to large units like pats, small units like droppings, scientific context like scat, an agricultural context like manure. And in this golden age of recycling, the need has arisen for a term to refer to human feces being recycled as fertilizer. And so far, three euphemisms have appeared. Night soil, human ewer, and my favorite, human biosolids. So that's why we need euphemisms. Indeed, if you were to use the wrong euphemism in a particular context, the results would be rather odd. For example, if at the next doctor's appointment, the nurse came up to you and said, the medical lab will need a doo doo sample, you'd be a little surprised, as you would be if you bought a gardening magazine and it said, for nice plump tomatoes, fertilize your plants with cattle bowel movement. But we also need dysphemisms. There are times in life where the point for politeness has passed and one wants to remind listeners of how disagreeable what is being referred to truly is. For example, you might open your window and yell at some boor. Will you pick up your dog shit? Or recount an experience like the plumber was working under the sink and I had to look at the crack in his ass the whole time. Or you can imagine a wife snooping on her husband's email and saying, so while I've been taking care of the kids, you've been fucking your secretary? The offense is deliberate, and the English language gives us the means of expressing that strong emotion when the need arises. So there's dysphemistic swearing. There's also abusive swearing, where you deliberately use language as a weapon to intimidate or humiliate someone. And there are moments in life when the temptation arises to abuse or intimidate someone. And scholars who have studied maledicta, swearing, curses, imprecations have often commented on how the sheer linguistic ingenuity that goes into them all of the classic poetic devices, metaphor, imagery, connotation, alliteration, meter, rhyme, all of them are put to use in obscene imprecations. For example, you can liken people to effluvia and their associated organs and accessories is when you refer to someone as a piece of shit, an asshole, or a dickhead, you can advise them to engage in undignified activities such as to eat shit, shove it up your ass, or fuck yourself. You can accuse them of having engaged in undignified sexual activities, and every undignified sexual activity has an obscene imprecation. For example, incest, as in motherfucker, sodomy, as in bugger fellatio, as in cocksucker, masturbation, as in jerk and wanker. And my favorite comes from bestiality. This is a curse that was last used in 1585, but I suggest that it be revived. And the next time someone cuts you off in traffic, instead of using one of those hackneyed cliches, I suggest, suggest you advise the person to kiss the cunt of a cow, which not only at least brings some fresh imagery to the situation, but I think has a rather pleasing alliteration. There's idiomatic swearing, which is the mildest form of swearing, such as shit out of luck, get your shit together, piss poor, pissed off my ass, a pain in the ass, sweet fuck all. What the fuck? Which, it's actually rather puzzling what exactly those words are doing in that syntactic context. But clearly what's happening is the words are simply being used for their ability to arouse the interest and shock in the listener. Also can be used merely to assert a kind of macho or cool pose, or. Or in a more friendly manner among peers, to express informality, to say, this is the kind of setting where you don't have to watch what you say. Closely related to idiomatic swearing is emphatic swearing, where the taboo word again, is used to arouse a listener's attention. To call, focus on the following noun, as in this is or adjective. This is really, really fucking brilliant. He thinks he's a fucking scout master, Rip van fucking Winkle, close the fucking door, and so on. And the overuse of emphatic and idiomatic swearing leads to the form of English sometimes called fuck patois, as in the story of the soldier who said, I come home to my fucking house after three fucking years in the fucking war, and what do I fucking well find? My wife in bed, engaged in illicit sexual relations with a male. Then there's cathartic swearing, the phenomenon where when you cut your thumb together with a bagel or you spill a glass of beer in your lap, the topic of your conversation abruptly switches to theology or sexuality or excretion. Now, if you ask people why they swear in that way, they'll say it lets off steam, it releases tension. The hydraulic theory of the mind. The problem with this theory is that it can be no more than a metaphor, because neurobiologists haven't literally found a boiler full of steam in the skull or a set of valves and pipes. Just brain cells that fire in patterns. So more satisfying is the rage circuit theory that throughout the mammalian class, there is a reflex in which an animal, when suddenly injured or confined, engages in a furious struggle accompanied by a sudden angry noise, presumably to startle or intimidate an attacker. Anyone who has sat on their pet cat or caught a dog's tail in a door is well familiar with this reflex. In humans, the idea is that this reflex also triggers the language system which has taken over control of our vocal tract. So in addition to uttering a yelp, we might articulate the yelp using a word for a strong negative emotion, one that we ordinarily inhibit ourselves from saying. And I think there's a lot to the rage circuit theory, but it has one problem, which is that cathartic swearing is conventional. You have to learn what to yell in a particular language when a particular accident befalls you. So in English, for example, if you hit your thumb with a hammer, you don't shout out whore or cunt, although there are lots of languages in which you do. And indeed, the cathartic swear word is specific to the cause of the misfortune. So if someone cuts you off in traffic, you might say asshole, but if you stub your toe, you'd be more likely to say shit or damn or fuck. So this leads to the response cry theory from the great sociologist Erving Goffman, that cathartic swearing is communicative. It is not just an overflow of emotion. It basically informs a real or virtual audience that you are currently in the throes of some very strong emotion, indeed so strong that you can't completely control it. Nonetheless, you are signaling exactly what emotion you're feeling, and so it belongs together with other response cries in a language like aha, ouch, whoops, wow, yes, and yuck. And therefore has that communicative function. So, to sum up, language as a window into emotion. Humans are prone to strong negative emotions. So language tells us. Awe of the supernatural, disgust at bodily effluvia, dread of disease, hatred of disfavored people in groups, revulsion at depraved sexual acts. Nonetheless, people sometimes want to impose these thoughts on others to gain their attention, to intimidate or humiliate them, to remind them of the awfulness of the objects and activities, or to advertise that one has the normal reactions to misfortunes. Okay, part three. Language is a window into social relations. Again, I'll begin with a puzzle of language. This one comes from the film Fargo, from an early scene in which a Kidnapper has a hostage in the back seat of his car, is pulled over by a police officer because he's missing his plates, is asked to show his driver's license. He hands over his wallet with the driver's license visible and a $50 bill extending ever so slightly. And he says to the officer, I was thinking that maybe the best thing would be to take. Take care of it here in Brainerd, which, of course, everyone interprets as a veiled bribe. Now, this is an example of an indirect speech act, a case in which you don't blurt out exactly what you say, but you veil it in innuendo, expecting your listener to listen between the lines. Another example, if you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome. This is a polite request when you think about it. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but nonetheless, it is instantly understood as a request. We're counting on you to show leadership in our campaign for the future. Anyone who's been unfortunate enough to sit through a fundraising dinner is familiar with euphemistic snoring like that. That is a solicitation for a donation. Would you like to come up and see my etchings? This has been recognized as a sexual come on. For so long that in 1932, James Thurber could draw a cartoon with a confused young man saying to his date, you wait here and I'll bring the etchings down. And then. Nice story you got there. Would be a real shame if something happened to it, something that we all recognize as a veiled threat. So the puzzle is, why are bribes, requests, seductions, solicitations, and threats so often veiled when both parties know exactly what they mean? This isn't just an academic puzzle, but it has a great deal of practical importance, such as in the crafting and interpretation of the language of treaties and diplomacy, and in the prosecution of extortion, bribery, and sexual harassment, which are often conveyed by innuendo rather than overtly. The solution turns out to be more complicated than I thought when I tried to explain the phenomenon. And I think there are at least three components to the solution. The logic of plausible deniability, the logic of relationship negotiation, and the logic of mutual knowledge. And I'll explain what I mean by each of those. Let me start with the. With what the game theorist and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Schelling called the identification problem. Namely, how do you deal with another intelligent agent when you don't know his or her values? Bribing a police officer being a prime example. Imagine that you had two choices when you were pulled over. Either to utter a blatant naked bribe or not to bribe the officer. What will happen? Well, it depends very much on what kind of officer you get. You could get a dishonest officer who might would accept the bribe, giving you the very high payoff of going free. Or you might have an honest officer who not only would rebuff the bribe, but might arrest you for attempting to bribe an officer in which you'd have the very high cost of an arrest for bribery. So neither option in this row is. Sorry, neither row is appealing. Both of them involve significant costs. But given this situation, you're better off with a traffic ticket than risking the arrest for bribery. But now imagine you had a third option, namely to issue a veiled bribe through innuendo. Like, I was wondering if maybe we could take care of it here. Well, if you have a dishonest officer, he could sniff out the bribe in the innuendo. And you get the very high payoff of going free from an overt bribe. If you had an honest officer, even if he suspected the bribe, he couldn't make it stick in court because of the demand of proof, something beyond a reasonable doubt. And so the worst you get is a traffic ticket. So you get the high payoff of an overt bribe with a relatively small cost of not bribing at all, all combined in one option. So the veiled bribe is the rational choice. This is the logic of plausible deniability. But the reason it's not enough is that what about non legal contexts? It's not as if we spend our lives in legal jeopardy of particular predefined legal penalties or proving something in a court of law. What about when you want to bribe someone in everyday life? Now you might say, when would a law abiding citizen want to offer a bribe in everyday life? Well, how about this? You want to go to the hottest restaurant in town, you have no reservation. Why not slip the maitre d a$20 bill and see if you can can be seated immediately in exchange for the 20? Well, this was the assignment given to the food writer Bruce Filer by Gourmet magazine on a dare from the editor. And he had to write up his experiences in doing that. And I found the write up as a psychologist, utterly fascinating. First of all, it was marked by extreme anxiety. As far as I know, no one has ever been sent to jail for attempting to bribe a maitre d. Nonetheless, he begins his article as follows. I am nervous, truly nervous. As the taxi bounces through the trendier neighborhoods of Manhattan, I keep imagining the possible retorts of some incensed maitre d. What kind of establishment do you think this is? How dare you insult me? Do you think you can get in with that? Second, when he did screw up the courage to offer a bribe, he instinctively veiled it in an innuendo. He would say things like, I hope you can fit us in, or, can you speed up my weight? Or, I was wondering if you might have a cancellation, or, this is a really important night for me. The third interesting finding was the outcome, which is that he was invariably seated in between two and four minutes to the astonishment of his girlfriend. This is something worth knowing next time you want to get into a chic San Francisco restaurant on a Saturday night with no reservations. So what's going on here? Well, here's a general theory that language has to do two things. You have to convey the particular content, like a bribe, a command, or a proposition. At the same time, you have to negotiate the kind of relationship you have with a person. The solution is to use language at these two levels. The literal form is consistent with the safest relationship you have with the listener. The speaker then counts on the listener reading between the lines to entertain a proposition that may be incompatible with that relationship. And politeness is a straightforward case. What's going on with. If you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome. For one thing, we'd have to admit it's kind of an overstatement. It would literally be in inspiring awe. Also, why are you pondering hypothetical possible worlds right then and there at the dinner table? Well, the listener, assuming that the speaker is not mad, figures that the speaker says an outcome is good, therefore he must be requesting it. The overall effect is that the intended content, namely, the imperative, gets through. But crucially, without the presumption of dominance, that is, without the impression that you are treating your listener as some kind of underling or flunky. So if dominance is one of the relations that people try to avoid in their speech, what are the other relationships that people are sensitive to? Well, an anthropologist named Alan Fisk has argued that dominance is one of three major types of human relationships that characterize social interaction in all of the world's cultures. Each prescribes a distinct way of distributing resources. Each has a distinct evolutionary basis, and each applies most naturally to certain people, but can be extended via language to others. So there's dominance, whose ethos is don't mess with me and which must have come from the dominance hierarchies that are ubiquitous among the primates. There's a very different mindset of communality, where the ethos is share and share alike, which is probably the product of kin selection and mutualism and is naturally applied to kin, spouses and close friends. Then there's reciprocity, the ethos of you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. The tit for tat trading of goods and services in a businesslike manner that follows the laws of reciprocal altruism. Now, critically, people distinguish these kinds of relationships and behavior that's acceptable in one relationship type can be anomalous in another. So at a cocktail party, you might go over to your girlfriend's plate and help yourself to a shrimp off her plate, but you wouldn't go up to your boss and help yourself to a shrimp off his plate, because that would be confusing the communality relationship that couples have with the dominance relationship that a supervisor commands. Or at the end of a dinner party, if you were to pull out your wallet and offer to pay your host for the cost of the food, that would not be perceived as polite, that would be perceived as rude. And the reason is that it applies the reciprocity mindset that would be appropriate in a store to a communal friendly gathering where the ethos is communality. Now, when in those situations where relationships are ambiguous, divergent understanding can be costly. That is, we experience an unpleasant emotion, we have a name for it, awkwardness, when the two parties aren't sure of the relationship type. For example, there can be moments of awkwardness in the workplace where an employee doesn't know whether he can refer to his boss on a first name basis or invite him after work for a beer. It's well known that good friends should not engage in a business transaction like one selling his car to the other, that it puts a strain on the friendship, because these are reciprocity and communality are diametrically opposed ways of dealing with resources. The conflict between dominance and sex, as when a supervisor solicits an employee, defined the battleground for sexual harassment. And the conflict between friendship and sex is what makes dating such a fraught domain and the subject of so many situation comedies. Well, this gives rise to a social identification problem where the social costs of awkwardness from a mismatched relationship type can duplicate the payoff matrix of the legal identification problem that is raised by bribing a copy. And bribing a maitre d is a perfect example where the clash is between the authority that a maitre D ordinarily exerts over his fiefdom and the reciprocity that you are raising by the possibility of the bribe. So once again, your choices are offer a bribe. If your choices would just offer a bribe or don't offer a bribe, the results would depend on whether you got a corrupt maitre d who would accept it and seat you immediately, or a scrupulous maitre d who would say, how dare you insult me? What kind of establishment do you think that is? If you don't offer a bribe, you accept the dominance relationship of the maitre d and you avoid the awkwardness, but you just have the long wait for the table. If you offer the bribe, then if you have a corrupt maitre d who consummates the reciprocity relationship, you get the quick table. You have a scrupulous one who continues to maintain dominance. When you're insist suggesting reciprocity, you get that unpleasant emotion called awkwardness. If you say, I was hoping there might be a cancellation. On the other hand, the corrupt maitre d could sense the bribe and you'd get the high benefit of the quick table. The scrupulous one could choose to ignore it. And the worst that you would have is the long wait, preserving the harmony of relationship type. So this is, I think there is one problem that still remains even solving the maitre d problem, which is that people aren't naive. How do you deal with the problem of meta knowledge? The fact that usually both parties know when an overture has been made by innuendo? Life isn't a court of law. You don't have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. And so any deniability is not in fact all that plausible at all. Why should an obvious indirect overture feel less awkward than an overture that is done in so many words and that and hence is on the record? I'll illustrate that with a scene from the romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally. Early in the film, when the couple has just met, Harry makes a sexual comment and Sally says, you're coming on to me. And he says, what do you want me to do about it? I take it back, okay? I take it back. And she says, you can't take it back. He says, why not? She says, because it's already out there. He says, oh geez, what are we supposed to do? Call the cops? It's already out there. So the puzzle is, what is the status of an overture that is sensed to be out there or on the record or once said can't be unsaid, that makes it so much worse than a veiled over that's implicated indirectly well, there are a number of answers, but I think the most compelling is the concept that logicians and economists sometimes call mutual knowledge or common knowledge, which must be differentiated from identical individual knowledge. In individual knowledge, A knows X and B knows X. In mutual knowledge, A knows X, B knows X, A knows that B knows X, B knows that A knows X, A knows that B knows that A knows X ad infinitum. Now, this is a distinction with a difference that there are qualitative differences between shared identical knowledge and mutual or common knowledge in the technical sense. And a couple of everyday examples are. One, why do democracies enshrine freedom of assembly as a fundamental right? And why are so many people, political revolutions instigated? When a crowd assembles in a public square well before the assembly, everyone may have known that they were disgruntled. But when everyone comes together for that reason, now everyone knows that everyone else knows that everyone is disgruntled. That mutual knowledge can embolden people to challenge the authority relationship and bring down a dictator who would otherwise be able to pick up people off one at a time. Likewise, the whole point of the Emperor's New Clothes story depends on the concept of mutual knowledge. When the little boy said, the emperor is naked, he wasn't telling anyone anything they didn't already know individually, but he was conveying information nonetheless. Now everyone knew that everyone else knew and that everyone else knew that they knew. Once again, that could change the relationship and they could challenge the the authority of the emperor. The moral of this is that language is a very good way of exploding individual knowledge into mutual knowledge. The hypothesis is that innuendos merely provide individual knowledge, whereas direct speech provides mutual knowledge and it's mutual knowledge that is the trigger for maintaining or changing a relationship. So if Harry were to say, would you like to come up and see my etchings? Sally knows that she's turned down an overture. Harry knows that she's turned down an overture. But does Sally know that Harry knows? She could think to herself, maybe Harry thinks I'm naive. And does Harry know that Sally knows that he knows? Harry might wonder. Maybe Sally thinks I'm dense. There is no mutual knowledge and they can maintain the fiction of a friendship. Whereas if Harry were to have said, would you like to come up and have sex? Then Harry knows that Sally knows that Harry knows that Sally knows. They cannot maintain the fiction of a friendship. And I think this is what's behind the intuition that with overt speech you can't take it back. It's out there to Sum up language as a window into social relationships. People have to convey messages while unsure of their relationship. Indirect speech could minimize the risks in legal contexts with tangible costs like bribes and threats. The same thing can happen in everyday life, because relationship mismatches can have an emotional cost. And finally, indirect speech prevents individual knowledge from becoming mutual knowledge. And it's mutual knowledge that's the basis for a relationship. Okay, well, now I'm going to begin the end of my talk. In psychology, one often faces the problem of overcoming people's familiarity with their own mental processes and way of life to nullify the anesthetic of familiarity, to make the familiar seem strange. And one way of doing that is by framing the problem in terms of the Martian scientist. How would a Martian biologist arriving on Earth with no preconceptions characterize our species? Today's question is, how would a Martian linguist describe our species documenting our nature just from the way we use language? Well, I think you could say a lot. When it comes to human cognition, the Martian linguist would say that humans have an intuitive theory of the physical world. They locate things in space by identifying places and locating objects and qualitative relationships to them. They construe matter as formless stuff or discrete things which are stretched along one, two or three dimensions. They order and package events in time relative to their own moment of consciousness. And they explain events by identifying their causes, namely an actor that impinges on an entity. Human intuitive physics differs from real physics, but it helps them to reason and agree about aspects of reality relative to their purposes, their understanding of, of cause and effect, what they can know, change and will, how they package and quantify their experience, and how they assign moral responsibility. People not only have ideas, but they steep them with emotion. They stand in awe of deities. They are terrified by disease, death and infirmity. They are revolted by bodily secretions. They loathe enemies, traitors, and subordinate peoples. They take a prurient interest in sexuality in all its variations. Despite having negative reactions to so many thoughts, humans willingly inflict these thoughts on one another to remind them of the unpleasant nature of certain things, to intimidate or denigrate them, to get their attention, or to advertise their reactions to life's frustrations and setbacks. When it comes to human social life, humans are very, very touchy about their relationships with some of their fellows, typically kin, lovers and friends. Humans freely share and do favors with others. They jockey for dominance with still others. They trade goods and services on a tit for tat basis. People distinguish these relationships sharply. When one person breaches the logic of a relationship with another, they both suffer an emotional cost. Nonetheless, humans often risk these breaches, sometimes to get on with the business of life, sometimes to renegotiate their relationship. Finally, humans think a lot about what other humans think about them. And their relationships are ratified by this mutual knowledge. They know that others know that they know what kind of relationship they share. As a result, to preserve their relationships while transacting the business of their lives, humans often engage in hypocrisy and taboo. And those are some of the ways in which language can serve as a window into human nature. Thank you very much. Any questions? Gracefully. Yes, Hi. Where are you? There you are. I'm over here. Yes. I want to thank you for speaking today. It was awesome. Thank you. I had a question about your description about why swearing has the impact it does. Oh, you know, we're disgusted by effluvia. What that doesn't explain is why a person who perfectly understands multiple words for effluvia will find some of them swearing and some of them perfectly unobjectionable. Do you have a comment on that? Yeah. No. It's a very good, very pointed question. So it can't simply be that the word is associated with a referent. In addition, I think there's the. The taboo words have the. The communicative intent packaged into them that says, I am referring to this with full. With the intention of arousing in you the emotional reaction that the referent ordinarily arouses. So in addition to the semantics of what in the world it points to, there's this additional communicative message of. Here's why I'm doing it in order to offend you that that is absolutely. You're right. That that's absolutely crucial to the distinction between a taboo word and. It's polite euphemism. Yep. Yeah. So congratulations. I think you've just done 90% of the swearing that's ever been done in this room in 20 minutes. Although I insist that I don't swear. I talk about swearing. Okay. See, any of you taking philosophy will recognize the use versus mention distinction. I'll keep that trick in mind. I'm wondering whether part of your claim is. Is also that the swear words basically span the space of important negative emotions or whether there are gaps. Are there important negative emotions that aren't accounted for by swearing? I think in a particular language, they don't span the space they sample from it across the world's languages. I suspect they would span the Space that is, you find, I mean, it's kind of surprising to hear cholera as a tepid word in Yiddish, also in Polish. And one has to look across languages to get the full spectrum. But there are enough of them that I suspect you would in hunter gatherer cultures, for example, they're taboo words for dangerous animals. You can't mention the name of the word in polite company. The name of the animal, for example.

Do you have any favorite theories or experiments about either of the following? One is use of swear words to cover for a small vocabulary for pejoratives and exclamations. The second is a dampening effect for.

If someone's subjected to a lot of.

Curse words in the recent past, the next one doesn't have as much of an emotional effect on them.

Yeah, that's certainly true. And I think especially emphatic swearing and idiomatic swearing can often be used to make up for otherwise limited linguistic resources, because the challenge of a speaker is to retain the listener's attention. Why should they listen to you as opposed to all the other people that they could listen to? And a cheap way of doing that is to exploit this little buzz that a taboo word arouses. And just like other ways of trying to keep listeners listening to you as opposed to all the other people they could be listening to, you can rely on that. I think that it's not enough just to hear these swear words. I think that they have to be heard in a context in which one knows that they're not being used in an aggressive or taboo breaking fashion. So one of them could be the use of taboo words in these idioms, which clearly in the Argos of soldiers and athletes and Australians and teenagers, they lose some of their sting. And that you can see that happening over time in mainstream English. It's happened to bloody and damn, both of which were taboo in the first half of the 20th century, as in when Rhett Butler said, frankly my dear, I don't give a damn. And it was considered shocking at the time in Australia, New Zealand. Bugger is. Is a perfectly acceptable word. So that can happen. And also, of course, there's the phenomenon of the targets of taboo epithets appropriating the. The word in affectionate conversation among themselves, therefore nullifying it, as in the affectionate use of nigger among African Americans or queer, dyke, bitch, and so on. That's another way in which they can be defanged.

So it just made me think of something else. There's the opposite effect of euphemistic decay, where the Euphemisms become proxies for the other things, like playground language. Start calling people special because that now means retarded.

Yes, I call that the euphemism treadmill, where when the referent continues to be emotionally charged, the of use euphemism will cease to become a euphemism and will in turn become offensive. So you're right, a complete answer would say that it doesn't always work, that sometimes the referent can just taint any word that is used in connection with it, even a new one.

So what I was actually going to ask about was one of the things that's very popular at the moment in the computing world is what we call social software or social networks, where we're trying to construct models for people to communicate with each other. And it strikes me that from what you say about representative human relations, we're making a mess of it by just calling everyone friends or not expressing the nuances here. Are we on a loser here or do you think we could express these euphemistic things in terms that computer could understand?

It might be possible because there is, of these three relationships, an enormous amount of cultural, a number of cultural practices and social life comes into a kind of mind manipulation to try to force or seduce people to accept one or another of these relationship types. So for example, the use of kinship terms like, you know, sisterhood is powerful, brother, can you spare a dime? Is one way of getting a stranger into the mindset of communality. Signs of dominance, the headdresses and nepalettes and shoulder pads. I think I have some shoulder pads. Here are ways of conveying a smidgen of dominance in a relationship that otherwise would be egalitarian. And there are numerous techniques, some verbal, some almost have to be non verbal in order to be effective, where we try to manipulate people to accept one or the other. So they are, I think we've got these three switch settings in our brain. But what triggers them can be is often a subject of benign and sometimes not so benign manipulation. So it could be possible. Yeah, so I think there are a lot of common instances where the words decay. You were sort of talking about how.

A word had a very strong potent.

Effect at some point and over time it lost that.

Are there many examples of the opposite?

When a common word becomes tainted and attracts that. I was told once that the words like shit were sort of everyday Anglo Saxon words and then they acquired that power. Yes, that's exactly right. And one reads in sources before, more or less, before the Reformation. I think that might Be a dividing line where. Which marked a transition from religious to sexual and scatological swearing in Protestant, but not in Catholic countries, where. Which retain religious swearing. But it may have been then that words, as you note, shit and fuck and cunt were actually unexceptionable words in English and they took on taboo, sweet status. Something like that in more recent times is what happened to the word nigger over the last little while. Which is why you can get library wars surrounding Huckleberry Finn, where the casual use of nigger and Huckleberry Finn, it certainly wasn't a respectful term, but it didn't have that same aura of racism and contempt that it has now. And nigger, probably our most taboo word, might be an example of that. I think that may be true of other terms seen to be kind of misogynistic and where we have a increased sensitivity, as in Don Imus using the word ho out of context, where it cost him his job because of our heightened sensitivities to racial and gender bias. So you could almost see a transition where originally people really were worried about God and hell, then they were worried about sexuality and excretion, now they're worried about sexism and racism. Yeah, those seem to be sort of power relationships.

I was wondering if they're sort of.

More ordinary, a more ordinary example. Well, I think some of them are. I don't know if their power so much as, say, imposed by those in power to retain power so much as, pardon me, dominance could be dominance. But I think it's also just what people are kind of edgy about. And that creates the opening, I think, for using certain words to get a rise out of people. So I suspect. I don't know, I haven't really thought about it, but I suspect it's more of a kind of what's in the air than the authorities kind of imposing it from the top down would be my hunch.

You spoke a lot about the connection between swear words and negative emotions. I wonder also about the connection between swear words and humor or swear words and laughter. You may have noticed that you caused a lot of laughter in this room when you. When you mentioned a lot of those words. It's also something that you hear a lot, maybe in a comedy show, just to kind of invoke that laughter. I wonder if you have any comments on that.

That's right. It is also talking about lazy ways of getting a laugh out of people. Often taboo words can do that. I think it's partly because, by the way, just an aside is that laughter is Also a very good way of generating mutual knowledge. And I would argue that the evolutionary function of laughter is to generate mutual knowledge. It's involuntary, it's conspicuous, it's more common in social settings than in isolation. It's contagious, and so on. But why? Why do you laugh in public? And in particular, what's the common denominator with swearing? I think it's the reduction of dignity. Just about all humor involves some kind of reduction in dignity. You either take someone down a few pegs, making them the butt of a joke, or to maintain communality and negate dominance among friends, you tease your friends or deprecate yourself. But dissent in dignity is, I think, the common denominator in human. In humor. I'm sorry. And the undignified nature of what you refer to in swearing is an ingredient of taboo language. I came in a little late, so I apologize if you've already addressed this in the beginning, but I was wondering if you could speak to the tone in which language is delivered and not necessarily just the word selection. So something as innocuous as what are you doing? Hey, what are you doing?

What are you doing?

Hey, what are you doing? Like, yeah, for example. Yes. Well, that's the prosody which often can be used both for emphasis, for stressing a particular part of your utterance, which the listener ought to attend to. Often, in contrast with some implied set of alternatives, is a very powerful rhetorical tool. And superimposed on that is the elocutionary force of an utterance, question versus statement versus command. And a third dimension on top of those two is emotion, anger, sarcasm, iron, and so on. That's one of the reasons why written language can so easily be misunderstood. If you don't have those intonational cues, why, we have crude approximations like italics and exclamation points. But it really is an essential ingredient to linguistic communication and of course, put to grammatical uses in languages like Chinese, in which tone is used as a way of contrasting vowels in connection to today's talk. I suspect that tone of voice is one of the ways in which you learn which words are taboo as a child. Namely, if some epithet is being uttered in an angry and contemptuous tone of voice, that then it's more likely to be registered as a taboo imprecation. Likewise, in cathartic swearing, how do you know which are the taboo words that you utter when you stub your toe, and so on? Well, it's the, I think, accompaniment of the word and the emotional tone of voice that register that association in the brain and just like to say thank you very much for coming. Thanks for having me. Thank you very much.