What the F Read online

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  In the literature on aphasias, there are no such people. At least not “people” in the plural. There’s just a person. One of them. I present for your consideration that one case. A 1993 report in the journal Neurology describes a patient who—like many—had damage to the right hemisphere of his brain.19 But the behavioral consequences of this damage manifested in a peculiar way. This patient, who was bilingual in French and Hebrew, spoke like a typical speaker of both of his languages. That is, until it came to automatic speech. Reportedly, after suffering brain damage, he was unable to sing familiar songs or recite nursery rhymes, and he couldn’t spontaneously swear. And this was most surprising because before suffering brain damage, he was reportedly an enthusiastic purveyor of profanity. Here he is: the mirror image of the parish priest! Instead of preserving automatic language, such as epithets, his brain damage specifically impaired that function alone.

  And now for the payoff: Where was his right hemisphere damaged? What brain circuitry is necessary for automatic speech? The basal ganglia, a system of subcortical brain structures—“subcortical” because they lie embedded beneath the cerebral cortex. They play a role in selecting appropriate motor actions by inhibiting ones you don’t want to perform and are closely tied to emotion centers of the brain.20 This patient lost the ability to blurt out emotionally charged idioms when brain damage compromised the functioning of his right-hemisphere basal ganglia.

  The basal ganglia, nestled underneath the cerebral cortex, are involved in selecting and inhibiting motor actions. Source: Modified from an image by John Henkel, of the Food and Drug Administration.

  From a single case study, we wouldn’t want to jump to the conclusion that the basal ganglia are always necessary for automatic speech. We also don’t know what aspect of automatic speech they’re responsible for or whether they’re necessary for all types of automatic speech. But this one case suggests that automatic language—including spontaneous swearing—might be generated by brain circuits responsible for automatic processes other than language that are tightly linked to emotion centers. We’ll explore each of these themes in the remainder of this chapter. But as an intermediate conclusion, we’ll have to content ourselves with this: automatic swearing is localized differently from other types of language, and as a result it behaves differently when the system is stressed or damaged. Although specific brain areas like Wernicke’s and Broca’s are vital to using a lot of language, many others are also involved. Language is manifested heterogeneously in the brain.

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  The evidence from automatic aphasia implicates the basal ganglia in automatic speech. On its own, this evidence would be suggestive but not conclusive. As it turns out though, the basal ganglia can come to have altered functioning in other ways. Tourette’s syndrome is a hereditary neurological disorder affecting the basal ganglia,21 which, in line with these structures’ known functions, affects people’s ability to control their own actions. Tourette’s is characterized by the production of spontaneous and uncontrollable tics. These tics can take the form of movements of the body or face or undecipherable noises that sound like grunts or throat clearing. Or the tics can be actual words.

  In some cases, the words that people with Tourette’s uncontrollably utter are taboo. This symptom, possibly the best-known aspect of the syndrome, is called coprolalia (that’s from the Greek kopros [“feces”] and lalia [“speech”]). Coprolalia is the feature of Tourette’s focused on most by the media—see, for instance, the depiction of a person with Tourette’s by Amy Poehler in the 1999 film Deuce Bigalo: Male Gigolo. The reasons for this fascination are perhaps obvious: losing control over taboo language is more shocking than losing control over clearing your throat. But despite this attention to the taboo side of the syndrome, only somewhere between 10 and 50 percent of people with Tourette’s (depending on who’s counting and whom they count) actually display coprolalia.a Nevertheless, coprolalia has been documented in people with Tourette’s speaking dozens of languages, including English, Japanese, Czech, and even signed languages, where signers uncontrollably produce obscene signs.b Some hearing people with Tourette’s also make obscene gestures uncontrollably (so-called copropraxia).22

  I know what you’re thinking. If Japanese doesn’t have profanity, then how can a Japanese speaker have coprolalia? According to the three case studies I know of (summarized in Van Lancker and Cummings [1999]), Japanese coprolalia includes insults (like baka [“foolish”] or dobusu [“ugly”]) and childlike words for genitalia (like chin-chin [“penis”]). They’re words that describe taboo concepts or that you wouldn’t use in polite situations, even though the words themselves aren’t profane.

  The difficulty in assessing the true incidence has several causes. Most critically, the diagnostic criteria for Tourette’s syndrome have changed over the years, most notably in 2000, when the DSM-IV loosened them to include any person experiencing persistent vocal and motor tics (removing age-of-onset and frequency criteria, among others). This led to increased diagnosis of Tourette’s syndrome and a resulting decrease in coprolalia proportion estimates.

  For the people it affects, living with coprolalia can be challenging. Imagine being unable to restrain yourself from uttering profanity in the supermarket or the office or when picking your child up from kindergarten. Some people with coprolalia describe the compulsion as akin to a sneeze—you feel a growing impulse that can only be alleviated by its release. Because it’s hard to suppress coprolalia—just like sneezes—people with this condition often take the path of avoidance, finding ways to stay out of public as much as possible. They often also develop coping strategies for those occasions when other people are around. One of the most effective is to replace words or parts of words when they burst out. Apparently, it’s harder for many people with coprolalia to suppress or substitute a whole word than to modify just the end of a word that’s coming out anyway. For example, if a person’s impulse is to say cock, closing the mouth intentionally toward the end of the word will produce cop instead. It might seem strange to run around yelling cop, but it’s hardly as socially stigmatized as the alternative.23

  If we set coprolalia and the swearing preserved in aphasia side by side, we can see that they differ in revealing ways. For instance, nothing like the substitution strategy has ever been described in aphasia, and aphasics don’t feel the welling up of an urge to curse experienced by most people with coprolalia. But more interestingly, the specific taboo words selected are mostly distinct. Aphasics with preserved automatic speech often produce predominantly expletives expressing frustration or surprise, like shit, fuck, or goddamnit. But the expletives present in coprolalia tend toward words for body parts and bodily effluvia, as well as racial, ethnic, and gender-based slurs. This is true across languages.24

  Both types of profane words—those preserved in aphasia and those that burst out in coprolalia—express strong, transient emotional states. This has led some theorists to propose that swearing of both the aphasia and the coprolalia types is produced by different brain machinery than the rest of language.25 As I mentioned earlier, it’s possible that there’s one pathway for producing a lot of language—the one that’s been principally studied in humans and that in most people passes predominantly through the language centers of the left cerebral cortex and is used for the systematic, intentional composition of normal language. The second purported pathway is evolutionarily far older and shared with other mammals who themselves are bereft of anything like human language.

  The limbic system, emotion-generating regions deep in the brain, dominate this proposed second circuit. The basal ganglia are directly adjacent to and tightly interconnected with brain structures that process emotions, like the anterior cingulate, the hippocampus, and the amygdala. These ancient brain structures appear to play a role in generating emotional states that create motor impulses, which the basal ganglia then have to regulate and selectively suppress. In the case of coprolalia, the compromised basal ganglia are unable to suppress verbal
impulses along this pathway, which results in the characteristic expletives.

  Work with other animals—particularly other primates—has revealed closely homologous circuits. For instance, when neurons in the limbic system of macaques or squirrel monkeys are stimulated, the animals spontaneously produce emotional vocalizations.26 This implies that in the typical human brain, perhaps even mine and yours, everyday impulsive, automatic, emotional swearing may be driven by this very same circuitry—circuitry that is a mammalian or primate innovation rather than a uniquely human one. This circuit fills a vital evolutionary function for social beings, allowing an individual to transmit a signal identifying its internal emotional state readily and efficiently to conspecifics. If analogous circuitry is indeed responsible for reflexive human swearing, then it provides privileged access to emotion in the brain, laying bare a speaker’s covert internal experiences unmediated by rational and deliberate planning.

  But there’s a caveat. This older, emotion-driven circuit doesn’t behave the same way in humans as it does in other animals. As both Timothy Jay and Steven Pinker have pointed out, the vocalizations we produce when spontaneously swearing are conventionalized—they’re the product of socially driven learning.27 Swearwords are a different beast from shrieks or growls in that they have a specific learned form—you swear specifically in English or Chinese or ASL, whereas a monkey just shrieks in Monkey.

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  The ramifications of these brain facts are manifold. First, it appears that the classic view of language as left-lateralized and cortical, subserved by a set of distinct and specialized brain circuits (e.g., Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas), tells only part of the story. We also use another pathway for language, built from machinery that’s far older in evolutionary terms and shares little brain circuitry. Language is not monolithic in the brain.

  And on a bit of reflection, this makes sense. We use language for multifarious purposes. We should hardly expect the brain systems that support the production of anodyne phrases articulating rational thoughts (like the present sentence) to have the capacity to do double duty, also connecting abrupt, hot, emotional states like frustration and rage to the spontaneous, primal utterances that express them.

  And even this separation of the language capacity into two pathways surely understates the variety present in the brain. Although our evidence on the issue is poor at present, it wouldn’t be shocking if we used distinct machinery for the various things we do with language. Do we use a separate pathway for conventionalized greetings (Hi. How are you? Fine.)? Do we use another for onomatopoeia—words like cock-a-doodle-doo that sound like what they mean? And is more detailed variation afoot even within the two ostensible pathways we’ve been discussing? Is our two-way distinction too coarse? Perhaps we recruit distinct pathways when we spontaneously express frustration versus anger, fear versus arousal. To date, we just don’t know, in large part because the low-level neuroscience depends on having animal models to work with, and other animals share some but not all of our brain circuitry: Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas appear to be largely human specific, for instance. And other animals display some but not all of the communicative functions we deploy language for. In the future, better imaging techniques applied to the functioning human brain will surely reveal the extent of the diversity of neural instantiations of language behavior.

  Finally, it’s also worth reiterating here that it’s impossible to equate different brain pathways with different words. We can produce the same words in different ways. When compromised brain function leads to language deficits, it’s usually not specific words but specific ways of using them that are lost. Broca’s aphasia usually impairs deliberate, intentional articulation of words and preserves some automatic speech. That is, even an aphasic priest who spontaneously and fluently produces “the most forceful oath of the tongue” when frustrated will be unable to intentionally articulate the very same word.28

  5

  The Day the Pope Dropped the C-Bomb

  By any account, Pope Francis has made interesting choices. He has foregone the traditional, opulent Papal Apartments, electing to reside in a small, modest bedroom in a Vatican guesthouse instead. He wears a silver ring instead of the traditional gold. And he has made a practice of washing feet each Easter—not the feet of priests as his predecessors did but those of patients at a home for the elderly and disabled, non-Catholics, and women. In aggregate, these many small acts of modesty have helped him build up a public image as the pope of the vulgar people.

  Still, no one expected him to be quite this vulgar. On March 2, 2014, while delivering his weekly Vatican address, he slipped in a word that caught the world by surprise. He was speaking in Italian, and this is what he said: in questo cazzo. This translates literally as “in this dick,” but since the offending word cazzo is used in Italian roughly as fuck or fucking are in English, in colloquial terms, he said something roughly equivalent to “in this fucking . . .” I’m no papal scholar, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and proffer that this is an uncommon turn of phrase for a pope, even one fresh off an appearance on the cover of Rolling Stone. The media ran with it—the story was featured on the Huffington Post,1 NPR,2 and the Daily Mail,3 just to name a few.

  This particular incident is so surprising and juicy in part because it runs afoul of how we expect the pope to express himself. Uttering a profane word like cazzo places him in an ideological double bind. If the curse word was accidental, then he’s just as linguistically fallible as the next guy, which isn’t necessarily the ideal public image for the professed terrestrial representative of God. Conversely, he might still be infallible, yet have intended to say cazzo. Again, likely not the image he means to project. All signs point to the former explanation—that this was a case of mistaken articulation. The clearest evidence is what he said next. Immediately after in questo cazzo, he corrected his phrasing to in questo caso, meaning “in this case,” which seems more like something you’d hear from the Holy See. With a slip of the tongue, the pope revealed one more way that he’s like the people. Or did he?

  Everyone’s tongue slips, including the tongues of people who are not the pope. Researchers who try to quantify this sort of thing report that people generate speech errors at an average rate of one or two errors every thousand words, or one error per ten minutes of speech.4 But not all of these errors are equal. Some, especially errors that produce profanity, are particularly revealing. These are a big deal for the science of speech production—how people plan speech, select words to say, and articulate sounds. People produce profane and innocuous errors at different rates, which turns out to be one of the best ways to understand why we flub our words, how we’re able to avoid errors, and how the brain manages all this. And as we’ll see, in flubbing caso, the pope might have shown more of his hand than he intended.

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  Producing language is one of the most complicated things you do, and yet you hardly ever notice you’re doing it. When speaking fluently, you talk at a rate of about 120 to 180 words per minute.5 That’s a lot to churn out—two to three words per second. And despite the fact that words are separated by spaces in writing, you don’t typically pause after each word (unless you’re William Shatner).a This is in part because people in many speech communities feel pressure to keep talking once they’ve started. If, as a speaker, you don’t manage to make sound come out of your mouth more or less continuously, someone else might believe that you have no more to say and jump at the opportunity to take the floor. Or they might become concerned that something is wrong and check to make sure you’re not asphyxiating on your food or drifting to sleep. So you keep talking. And this taxes the system. In order to produce connected speech, you have to decide what the next word will be and start planning to say it before you’re even done with the current word. You have to look ahead. This, in part, explains why speech is populated with ums and likes and other filler words that allow you to keep making sound, even if you don’t know exactly what you wan
t to say. And it also generates speech errors.

  And if you, dear reader, actually are William Shatner, I take it all back! I’m a huge fan! I especially loved your Esperanto work in the cult-classic 1965 film Incubus! I have so many questions! Call me!

  Among the different kinds of speech errors you make—swapping, dropping, and even adding sounds—certain errors most clearly stem from the preplanning of words that are a little farther down the assembly line. A simple but common type of error happens when a person anticipates a later sound and accidentally pronounces it too early. For instance, you might intend to say shark pit but instead accidentally mispronounce it as park pit. An error like this could only occur if the speaker were already planning later words (in this case, pit) while still articulating the current one (shark), because the p from the second word ends up at the beginning of the first word. It’s also common to accidentally swap two sounds; you might know this as a spoonerism, but psycholinguists call it an “exchange error.” A typical example would be intending to say shark pit but accidentally producing park shit. This again would arise because you were planning the next word while articulating the current one.

  Because planning ahead causes exchange and anticipatory errors, we can actually harness them to reveal precisely how far ahead speakers plan. Some exchanges and anticipations are much more distant than just the adjacent word. We know this because linguist Victoria Fromkin of the University of California, Los Angeles, spent a large part of her career compiling a massive database of actual, observed speech errors. Among these errors were cases like a Tanadian from Toronto (instead of Canadian) and Baris is the most beautiful city (instead of Paris). These cases demonstrate how distant words can be and still exert influence on each other. Canadian and Toronto are two words and five syllables apart, while Paris and beautiful are four words and five syllables apart.6 The distribution of speech errors suggests that when you make errors, you’re already planning one to five words ahead of the word you’re currently articulating.7 And you’re likely planning ahead even when you don’t make errors.