Monthly Archive for September, 2005

Here is an inter­est­ing New York Times arti­cle about how researchers are using curs­ing to exam­ine the con­nec­tions between the con­g­ni­tive and emo­tional por­tions of the brain.

Curs­ing, they say, is a human uni­ver­sal. Every lan­guage, dialect or patois ever stud­ied, liv­ing or dead, spo­ken by mil­lions or by a small tribe, turns out to have its share of for­bid­den speech, some vari­ant on come­dian George Carlin’s famous list of the seven dirty words that are not sup­posed to be uttered on radio or television.

In one study, sci­en­tists started with the famil­iar Stroop test, in which sub­jects are flashed a series of words writ­ten in dif­fer­ent col­ors and are asked to react by call­ing out the col­ors of the words rather than the words themselves.

If the sub­jects see the word “chair” writ­ten in yel­low let­ters, they are sup­posed to say “yellow.”

The researchers then inserted a num­ber of obscen­i­ties and vul­gar­i­ties in the stan­dard lineup. Chart­ing par­tic­i­pants’ imme­di­ate and delayed responses, the researchers found that, first of all, peo­ple needed sig­nif­i­cantly more time to trill out the col­ors of the curse words than they did for neu­tral terms like chair.

The expe­ri­ence of see­ing tit­il­lat­ing text obvi­ously dis­tracted the par­tic­i­pants from the color-coding task at hand. Yet those risqué inter­po­la­tions left their mark. In sub­se­quent mem­ory quizzes, not only were par­tic­i­pants much bet­ter at recall­ing the naughty words than they were the neu­trals, but that supe­rior recall also applied to the tints of the tainted words, as well as to their sense.

Other inves­ti­ga­tors have exam­ined the phys­i­ol­ogy of curs­ing, how our senses and reflexes react to the sound or sight of an obscene word. They have deter­mined that hear­ing a curse elic­its a lit­eral rise out of peo­ple. When elec­tro­der­mal wires are placed on people’s arms and fin­ger­tips to study their skin con­duc­tance pat­terns and the sub­jects then hear a few obscen­i­ties spo­ken clearly and firmly, par­tic­i­pants show signs of instant arousal.

Their skin con­duc­tance pat­terns spike, the hairs on their arms rise, their pulse quick­ens, and their breath­ing becomes shallow.

This doesn’t look like bull­shit.

The New York Times — Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore via digg