 This episode of the podcast is supported by Audible. You can download and listen to the world's best storytelling. I use it all the time to inform work. You can listen to audiobooks, original series, and more on their free app. To get your free 30 day subscription, which includes a free book, click on the link in our show notes and enjoy. Hey folks, welcome to the podcast. Today I had a super smart lady to speak with me, Dr. Emma Byrne, who holds a PhD in AI from UCL. And she spent the best part of a decade building robots, neural networks, and looking into swearing and pain and all of that cool stuff. She wrote a great book called Swearing is Good for You. And so we discussed swearing, its effect on us physically and emotionally, and swearing with kids, and should they be swearing and the social impact and all of that cool stuff. So enjoy. Hey, it's Lewis, welcome to the podcast. Enjoy our conversations anytime, anywhere. Awesome, and we're live. Emma, thank you very much for coming in. Thanks for having me. Pleasure, how was your journey here? It was fun. It was the central line, so I managed to not swear, but that's not through anyone wanting to swear. You wanted to swear, that could be busy, that line. I just, I wish that people would figure out that when they lean on the doors, it makes them open slightly and then the train stops. And then it's the same person who's been leaning on the door, who's going, oh, why are we stuck? And it's just stuck. Nightmare. So yeah, but I'm here now. But it got you here. It got me here. And then I forgot the Warren of streets that is around here. Oh, around here, the nightmare. Most people come and end up coming to our back entrance. I did. Oh, you did, fine, fine. Thank you, Google Maps. So what's your background? You're a doctor. Oh yeah, not the useful kind. I cannot fix any ailments of the body or mind, but I can tell you how to build various different sort of machine learning and evolutionary algorithms. Also tell you quite a bit about structures in the brain and how they do cool and interesting things. I did computational neuroscience for a while, looking at how we learn to see colors and how we understand our visual environments. And not just us as humans, but basically anything that has to try to make sense of the visual environment. And then I spent some time with a fantastic American researcher whose dream it was to teach a virtual robot, not a real robot, but a virtual robot running around this maze, seeing various things to teach it language in the way that we teach children language and using a kind of neural network that isn't really used commercially because it's super expensive to build, called a cell assembly, but which is very much like the way that our neural activation works in the brain. A cell assembly. A cell assembly. So it's a guy called Donald Hebb or Dio Hebb back in the very early 20th century before we had, I think before we even had EEG machines, certainly before fMRI scanners. And he posited this idea that rather than a memory being held in a single neuron, this idea of a grandmother neuron, that they're held in assemblies of cells and that those assemblies are activated by other assemblies and it's kind of like a whisper network. So you might hear something that sounds like a cat meowing and then you feel something furry and your brain is going, that cat, cat, cat, cat because all of the adjacent neurons to those particular areas that are getting that activation are starting to work in concert. And we tend to, even neuroscientists, we tend to talk about these things sort of dualists, like this activation means that you think of a cat but actually that activation is the process of thinking cat. So it's really hard to wean yourself off that dualism that neurons do something and then you have a thought. No, neurons do things and that is the thought. And we managed to get- Can we, and you can prove this and? Well, now we can see those sorts of levels of activation going on in the brain but the most interesting way that it's been recorded, it's like creepy, is you take things like rats or rabbits or cats and you do something called decorticating them. So taking a bit of the brain off and putting in electrodes that speak to particular neurons or very small populations of neurons and you watch how that activation in the brain happens while this poor bunny is sort of jumping around with at least something out of a lecture, which is why I'm too squeamish. To do that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So computational neuroscience is a nice way of doing it. You basically say, is it theoretically possible that this would happen and what are at least the sufficient conditions for this to happen, even if it's not exactly the same. So there are two things that you're always trying to look for, what is necessary and what is sufficient. And we learned that, yeah, you can take something that as long as it has the ability to process symbols, you can make it run around an environment and it can learn essentially a language of those environments to the point that it will then reply to you, you know, look, triangle. And it is, you say you have a three-year-old and a five-year-old broadcasting your mind back to the first bit of language of the doggie, look at the doggie. First, I always remember the first word was data and you're always so happy. So happy. You're like, yes. And then you realize that they all say data first. Yes, but it just proves what an important role it is that you take the first sound that baby's making and you make that the name of your role. Absolutely. Absolutely. How did all your swearing stuff come into your neuroscience and AI and all that? So the other thing, when that makes me sound even weirder than I do already, that I'm fascinated by is pain. Pain. Yes, what in neuroscience literature tends to be referred to as aversive stimulus. But they mean pain or things that are shitty happening to you. And how that... So physical and mental. Physical and mental and there's a really cool research. I think I managed to mention it in the book, I'm not sure. When you look at the activation in the brain when people have physical versus social pain, it's very, very similar. And we know from various different experiments that you can make social pain or things like break up from a relationship or grief actually responds to things like paracetamol. A clinical dose of paracetamol will make you feel less sad when it is a social pain. But the killer experiment for this, pain researchers, I just... It's just like a placebo effect or an actual like... That was a really important question. Is there something physically similar about social and physical pain? So what they did once, there is a well-known phenomenon that if you experience a mild pain like, and they usually use a sort of mild burning pain or a mild electric shock or these very carefully calibrated needles in these labs, if you experience a mild pain, the next pain that you feel tends to feel more intense. Whereas if you feel a major pain, the next pain that you feel tends to feel less intense. And I'm not a great fan of evolutionary psychology, but it does kind of make sense that if your leg is broken, lying still and hoping that nothing is going to savage you to death, it's probably a good idea. Whereas if you've merely stubbed your toe, then running home is faster. You just go, yeah. But in order to test whether or not there was the same relationship between social and physical pain as there is between physical and physical pain, there was a brilliant experiment that just tells you everything you need to know about how evil psychologists are. Really? So they had these people go in and they said, we're going to be doing this experiment on pain tolerance, but actually the equipment's not set up yet. So while we do that, you can do this other experiment for us if you wouldn't mind. And then you were randomized to one of two conditions. In the first condition it was, we have this new fangled internet thing, this is back in about 93, and you can play this game of catch with people on the internet. Not all they do is basically, they say your name and the ball is yours and you have to say someone else's and throw it to them. Except all it was was a random name generator that would just never say that person's name so they'd feel a bit left out. So that's a mild social pain. For the major social pain, instead, they said, we have this researcher in at the moment and they're from like Harvard, Yale, Oxford, I don't know, something with a good halo effect. And they've probably even come in in a white coat, like quite often if you want to intensify or see that you put a white coat on, I think Bank Older, it's quite a lot like that. And they come in, they have this questionnaire and they say, we have this amazing computer program. Again, early 90s, we really believed that computers would be that smart. And you fill in this questionnaire and it will make spot on predictions about your likely life trajectory. Would you like to do that? So I think, yes, you tick all these various boxes about I like to go out more than stay in or I'm kind to my friend. And then you go outside, rip up the bit paper and come back in with a pre-prepared statement that says things like, you are fundamentally unlovable. Everything you try to do in your life, you will fail at because you just don't have either the aptitude or the determination. If you're in a relationship now, it's basically doomed because you're so awful. Oh, anyway, it's at the time. Now we've got this pain experience, harsh, devastating. And lo and behold, those people that had had this devastating personal statement thought that the pain was considerably less intense that those had just had a mild, you feel a bit left out. And so the researchers wrote this wonderful paper saying, yeah, we know that this strong social pain acts the same as a strong physical pain. There is a subsequent analgesic effect that you don't get from the mild social pain. And I was looking through this paper, I was going, please tell me, please tell me you told them at the end, it was a sad, please tell me you told them, oh, thank God for that. It's like looking for the bit where it's like, and all participants were fully debriefed as to the nature of the experiment. But the damage was done. Like even so, you're still gonna wake up at night, aren't you, go, what if I really have? Just in case they were right. Yeah. But I was reading, I've been reading the happiness hypothesis, Jonathan hates bit. And one of the things he was saying was that people experience trauma early in life and much better prepared to deal with it later on in life. Which kind of seems to link to... Yeah, I mean, my brother and I both grew up in the same household and we dealt with things very differently. Either you go, that's the worst bloody thing that could ever happen to me and nothing else could be that bad ever again. Or you end up so PTSD ridden. Right, right. It's one of the other. It's sort of self-medication. So I wouldn't go around prescribing, you know, child trauma as a means of teaching resilience because the other thing that teaches resilience is secure attachment, is knowing that you are loved well. But if as long as you have someone who can help you through the inevitable, not necessarily inevitable, but the likely things like PTSD and major trust issues and let's face it, depression, then yes, that sort of resilience of going, I got through that. That's good to go through tough stuff, right? I think it's probably inevitable. It's just the timing of where it comes in your life. A lot of it, I guess, is to do with how plastic your brain is at that point. I mean, our brains are plastic throughout life. But if I was interested in what Emily was saying, that she'd up until graduating from university, she'd just done, she'd just excelled at everything. And then she's in this job market with a million other excellent people at that moment where she spoke about realizing she was one over a million, not one in a million. And I think, yeah, if that hits you for the first time when you don't have people around you who are gonna go, hey, it's okay, we can get you through this. I think if it happens to you the first time as an adult, that's really tough. Oh, yeah, you get smacked straight in the face. Like, it's real life. Standing on a ray. It's not a Disney movie. No. You know, you used to get, you know, they give like prizes at school for finishing last, often. Right. And some, you know, like they're programming kids to, and then you get into a real world. If it doesn't work out, you get made redundant. If you don't get the effort in, you know, you just gotta, it's different. I think there are different ways of teaching resilience. One is the whole sink or swim. And it is, that's one of the few things that in neuroscience or in psychology, the common phrase is used. So we have aversive stimulus for pain. But sink or swim is, oh, and my favorite one for live fast, die young is an accelerated life history. Live fast, die young. Yes. Arrest when I die. It's basically things like people who take a lot of drugs, drink a lot, have a lot of risk of sex. But instead of saying, you know, and these people who tend to have live fast, die young, it's an accelerated life history. But sink or swim, I mean, that is one way of teaching resilience, but it has a high attrition rate because not everybody swims. True. Whereas teaching kids perseverance and the idea that you get knocked down, but you get up again, ain't never gonna keep you down. I mean, I think Chumbawamba should be on the syllabus, frankly. Because that idea that you get through life without ever getting knocked on your ass is, it just doesn't happen. There's a guy called Jaco Willick, he's an American ex-army guy, but he's super motivational, and he does a podcast for kids. So a guy I met yesterday told me about it, probably good for like from six, seven years old. And he's the guy that you want to tell your kids, like keep going, get up, you know, like in that kind of American, like, yeah, yeah. I'm gonna start playing it to my kids when they're old enough. Just get them fired up and ready. I get very mad because a lot of stuff that's aimed particularly at young girls and you're probably noticing it now is that, you know, she dreamed it so she achieved it or she thought she could so she did. And it's like, oh, shit. The most motivational poster I'd ever seen was in the window of a pharmacy and it was for like the creatine supplements or something. And it says, you don't get what you wish for, you get what you work for. Yeah, true. And I was like, you know, sort of modulate the inherent inequalities in society and the lack of a level playing field. But still, yes, you don't get what you wish for. Back in the day when, I mean, now, you know, you walk out your door, you're not gonna get eaten by a lion or whatever. Back in the day, it was really single swim. You really had to go for it. And the ones that survived the most resilient, the ones that didn't. I mean, obviously now it's slightly different. I think it's interesting, it seems as though as well, because particularly in a lot of societies where it is still very single swim, the most valuable skill you have is being liked. And that's slightly worrying because it seems like that's been hacked a bit in Boris Johnson's affable persona being at odds with whether or not he actually has everybody's best interests at heart. But that ability to be cared for by the tribe, which is the reason why kids have big eyes, but also kittens and puppies look so damn cute. We have it in us to want to protect the genetic investment that we've just made. Of course, yeah. And remaining liked throughout your life is likely to make you survive, whereas being ostracized. And again, I think this comes back to the social pain. Why would social pain be so painful? Ostracism was death. Being ostracized by your tribe was death back in the day. If you're not involved in the hunts, if you don't get to share the spoils of that, if you don't have someone to take care of you, if you break your leg, you're dead. And that idea that fear of being disliked still drives us a lot. It's huge. It is. Yeah, even for adults, in fact, my daughter went to a kid's party. I won't mention who the kid was, in case their parents are listening. But anyway, the kid came up to my wife and my daughter and said to my wife, I don't like Florence. I find her really annoying and I don't want her at my party. This is like a five-year-old's kind of party. Let's win it, yeah. And she was like, or four, five, and she was like a little bit young to really know, to really care. But then she came back home because I wasn't there and she said, oh, daddy, like this girl said that she doesn't like me, she didn't want my party and I find her really annoying. And so it's quite interesting because you want to try and teach your kids to not give a shit. So I said, I ended up saying to her, look, no, everyone has a good taste. And she does want to play with you. Let's hold off, let's go play with someone else. Yeah. Yeah, easy to say. Yeah. Obviously very different to actually, you know, not to sweat those kind of things. It is, it's swimming upstream against sort of human nature, but it is really important that kids know that being like, because again, you know, it's making someone do something in order to be liked is another way that, you know, gremers, groom, bullies, bullies. Gits, gits. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like, well, if you don't like, my daughter's favorite threat at the moment, she's three and a half, is I'm not your friend anymore. Oh yeah, classic. I don't mind because I'm not your friend, I'm your mom, which means I love you and I want you to be okay and to be healthy and to be well. And if that means that you don't like me right now, that's fine because that's secondary to me. And she's at that point, she's like, ah, I'm not listening anymore. It's amazing how that develops so early on. So early on. And yeah, and I know it's something that is used by the kids in nursery to try to keep each other in line. My favorite one is the five year old in our house is in year one of school now. And it's a very nice school and it's literally around the corner. And we're like, oh God, we really hope ours gets in, but the catchment gets tinier over the years for all the siblings. And they only have 30 in their entry and my life has become so middle class parents, I'm sorry. But the older ones way of keeping the younger one in line is going, do you know what, behavior like that, they won't let you go to my school. And she says the name of her school and she pronounces it in such, you know, like it's the promised land. And it's, oh, my daughter immediately is like, okay, I will behave then. And then the cousin is like, you know, you, you know, if you don't, if you're not good, you won't get to go to my school. I'm really worried in case we don't fall in the catchment. She ends up going to a different school and she's gone for life, believe me. Well, you have to frame the story that she's actually gone to a better school. Better school. Yeah, yeah, it's funny. How's all the swearing come into your life? Oh, it's amazing. I finished the book. So I'd signed up. And your book's called Swearing is Good for You. That's right. Amazing Science of Bad Language. And it is amazing. I'm still, even now, years after writing it, flabbergasted by some of the research. But I sold the book to, well, an agent here. He was amazing. He sold the book in, oh gosh, about 20, the late 2015, early 2016, no earlier than that, sorry, 14, 15, but just as I became pregnant. And I said to the editor, I'm due to give birth on the 3rd of March. And I know my deadline is the 1st of April, but don't worry, I'll push it forward. I'll finish it early. And she went, don't worry. No, nobody finishes early. The first time authors definitely don't finish early. And I was like, you haven't met me. And I finished it. I was like bouncing on the yoga balls like the last sort of two chapters of edits. But yeah, I shipped it about two weeks before my daughter was due. And then she was like 10 days late. Oh no. We just got to chill out a little bit. But yeah, but because of the way that, I think this is something that I certainly didn't realize until I got into writing books because I'd done a bit of journalism before and obviously I'd done academic publishing. But the time scales for writing a book are much closer to academic publishing than they are to journalism. Unless you're doing something super timely, in which case it's rushed out. It takes about a year for the type setting, the cover design, the marketing, the sales and the rest of it. So it didn't come out until my daughter was about one and a half. No. Yeah, actually about one and a half. She's swearing already. Yeah, well, yeah, nearly. It wasn't long after, but that was kind of great because it meant I got a year of focusing on being a mum before the inevitable sort of publicity. Yeah, yeah, you've got to hit that, yeah. And then when it did, you know, I was much more able to go and talk at things like, I've talked at New Scientist Live and the Royal Society, but I've also talked at, sorry, the Royal Institution on the Royal Society. Shouldn't get that one. But I also did Stylist Live. Nice. And that was awesome because I had a room of, I don't know, maybe about 200 predominantly women. Maybe you're a couple of guys in there. And we're so used to this idea. Again, you know, you've got to be seen to be light and you're not supposed to moan too much and you're supposed to be quite self-deprecating. And so we have a tendency to not be honest with each other about the things that are getting us down. So what it did was at the beginning of the talk, I had everyone write down something that was really annoying them and then just screw it up and put it on the floor. And I did the talk and this is brilliant comedian, Jessica Foster, who is the chair. Nice. She talked about swearing. We talked about live. She talked about comedy. And then about five minutes before the end, I said, okay, everyone pick up your piece of paper from the floor and throw it at us. And what we'll do is we'll open it, we'll read it out and all together, we're gonna say, fuck that shit. And so women are sort of like, you know, I do all the housework, fuck that shit. Harvey Weinstein, fuck that shit. And then the very last one, and I couldn't have gone for the bathos if I had tried. It was like, you know, sexual harassment, fuck that shit, unequal pay, fuck that shit, pepper pig, fuck that shit. And it was just this whole room. And after all these women go, it's amazing. I didn't know that other women would be as angry about this as me. And it's like, that's how they get you. By being, you know, you're not supposed to be angry about stuff because it's so un-ladylike, so unattractive. We don't band together and go, no, we're all pissed off about this. Also swearing like that feels so good. It does. When you look at, there's a brilliant study that I did get to keep in the book, which is looking at if you randomise whether or not the same sentences are ostensibly said by a man or a woman, then men and women alike judge the ones that are ostensibly said by a woman as being much worse, much more offensive, much more appalling than the ones said by the guy. And you also say if you heard a man say this, what would you think about his intelligence, his self-control, whether or not you'd want to date him? And guys are completely un-impacted by any of those things. Whatever language they choose to use. Whatever language they choose to use. They're still smart, they're still in control, they're still worth dating, whereas women, it's like, oh, she's obviously not smart, she's obviously not in control, there's no way in hell I'd date her. And it's bizarre because what we're like in private is not, you know, women swear. And so women and men think the same about a guy. It's bizarre, yeah. We tend as women to think that, you know, the number of women who say, oh, I'm sorry, I'm really swearing. And it's like, we all are. It's just we're trained to, women are trained to lie about it. Yeah, it's a social thing, then. It seems to be. I mean, when the research was initially done on the rates of swearing, this was largely done in psychology departments where most of the professors were male and they would have co-educational groups, talking about some 1960s or something. And they would ask their male and female students, you know, what kind of language do you use and how do you express yourself? When you're angry and me, oh, yeah, I swear. I swear occasionally, I'll swear about, you know, a bad sports match or I swear about things that work. And we were like, no, I would never, ever, ever swear. Until, I can't remember the name of the researcher, but she was one of the first women to study this area. And she went, all right, so do you swear? And the woman went, God, yeah. I swear when I'm on my period, I swear when my boyfriend's an asshole. I swear when my, you know, when my, you know, turning my paper and it gets a bad grade. It's like, we swear about exactly the same things as guys swear about plus PMS. And then there was a paper about 15 years later called Wider Women Swear. By these couple of male psychologists from the Netherlands, they were just like, we're just trying to understand why women swear. And I was like, no one's ever asked why men swear. Weird. But it's still seen as weirdly aberrant among women, but the statistics show, when you do corpus analysis of just speech that is collected in the wild and then transcribed and you look through them, women use just as much swearing as men. We use slightly different forms, but we do use as much swearing as men. How does it affect us? So there are a number of different ways it affects us, but the most striking and the one that is most comprehensively demonstrated is how it affects your ability to deal with pain. So as a guy in Keel University, it links back to your pain thing. That's how I got into swearing in the first place. Because the lab I was in, we were based out of the science museum and we were looking to do things for their lates when they open for over 18s and there's a bar. And can you do some experiments with the members of public? And it's like, you can, but we can't use the data because depending on at what point of the night you collect the data, that's a very strong proxy variable for how pissed people are. You don't have good data from those, but it does let them see how experiments are centered on it, like to talk about the importance of a control and to talk about the importance of changing the order of presenting things and how big a number of people you need to participate to know if this is a genuinely in effect or not. So it was a good conversation point, but also it meant that I got to get a load of Imperial undergrads. A lot of single Imperial students would go, so largely men, but to stick their hands in ice cold water for as long as they possibly could and see some varying degrees of the cheese moa, which is very fun. So it's the ice bucket test. The ice bucket test, that's right. And you can indeed keep your hand in for about a third to half as long as again. If you're swearing, then if you're just using a neutral word. And I've done this at so many different talks now. My favorite one was, I think it was the Royal Institution one where there was a lady of a certain age. I'd say I don't wanna guess at her age, but she was a little older than me, so maybe fifties and she was great. She just effed it up. She was amazing. She went for it. And I was like, yes, Blake's great. But also she kept her hand in there for a really long time. She was really tall. I see a lot of people doing ice baths because it's supposed to be really good for you. And but they get through it with breathing into their nose and out of their mouth. But this is the thing. Should they just be swearing instead? Swearing isn't the only thing that's analgesic. There are things like taking analgesia or mindfulness. Mindfulness meditation is also really good. I'm not saying that swearing is the one and only way to kill pain, but it is demonstrably effective. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was so off-brand though when I did finally give birth to my daughter after 10 days. I knew it 10 days later. And I didn't swear once and I was in labor for like 72 hours. And it said to my husband and my housemate who was a birth partner, saying, can you count how many times I swear? Because I'm convinced that there'll be this nice sort of graph depending on how hard the contractions are. Yeah, I didn't swear once because I went so... Because you're breathing and the mindfulness stuff. Yeah. Wow. So it worked well. It actually went really well. That and all of the gas and air in the world. But I think, I can't remember whether I got to update this before it was published. I'd put a footnote either there or maybe it was in an article I wrote saying, I've discovered that the secret to a relatively painless birth is to have a long, thin baby with a tiny head. Well, yeah. I mean, all this stuff about, oh, did you manage it naturally? Oh, did you manage it with that? It's like, did you get through it without dying and without your baby dying? That's the most important thing. 100%. And this whole idea of birth shaming can go dying of dish. I mean, you try to do it naturally and if you can't, then you've got to get out. Yeah, exactly. You do it in the way that... It's like I know it. I mean, obviously, I'm never gonna be able to actually have on myself, but... But, you know, you have been either present or... I've been there a couple of times, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it is at the time, you know, just, oh, this idea that there are certain things like... I think the guys are swearing probably more. Yeah. Like, shit, shit. Keep it going. I've vomited all over and I've... Did he swear at you? I destroyed everybody. I don't remember them swearing, but I do still get reminded that I have destroyed various items of clothes along the way, too. Oh dear. That's what I'm about to say. Oh well. Yeah, it's like three and a half years ago. I should... It's all good fun. Buy my new coat and be done. It's all good fun. It's crazy. Someone was telling me that swearing has existed for like a ridiculous amount of time. It's certainly in our very oldest language and it's interesting because it tends not, for obvious reasons, you know, swearing is usually the kind of thing that is highly emotive and you tend to use it only in non-fogal situations. So it's not in official records, but as soon as you look at graffiti. Oh, that's true. So you wouldn't write it in an official document, typically. There have been trends. There have been some, particularly in regal documents, there are, and I'm not an historian on this, but there's a guy called John Gallagher who has a lovely thing of court records about people either being tried for swearing or something called flighting, where swearing was done essentially as a kind of an after-dinner entertainment in world courts. So there were times when swearing has actually been the height of cultural interest. That's, yeah, yeah. But it was a thing not to do. But there is that idea that you're doing it transgressively. Right, yeah, yeah. You know, the same way of like sort of throwing rotten fruits at your jester. It's like, you know, you're breaking some kind of social bond, but the idea being that you're so wealthy and you're so powerful that who the hell is gonna stop you. And even now it is used in different ways, depending on, you know, the company you're in and your socioeconomic class of, you know, am I using this defiantly? Or am I using this as a means of showing that I have no one that I need to be defiant to? And so there's a dip in frequency of swearing around the middle classes. All right. Where there is no, that feeling of defiance, but nor that feeling of absolute entitlement. And so the middle class is swear less than either working class or very moneyed wealthy. It's just nice to be yourself. It is. And for a lot of people swearing isn't part of what they're like. You know, a lot of people come up, I never really swear. And it's like, do you get angry at things? Like, no. And it seems to be the thing that stops you from swearing is actually just being generally pretty chill. And as someone with zero chill, I just, I am envious. I think I'm quite, I'm pretty chilled out. But I do like to swear. Like my mum works in our office too. She's not here today. And she's always tenement swear too much. She's like, don't fucking come into the office today. It's about swearing. But she always tells me I swear too much in the office. Right. But I like, but I, you know. There's some good research on this. I mean, there's some lovely papers, largely from the Antipodeses, which is brilliant. It's exactly where you'd expect them from us. Like Australia, New Zealand, and also Ireland doing research on how swearing helps with teamwork. Really? The Irish study is about swearing and how it helps rugby teams work together. But particularly, depending on the way that the swearing is used, if it's used judiciously and if it's never used to sort of kick down, it's more about expressing solidarity or sympathy or frustration, then it helps teams function really well. And we know this partly because of brilliant study that looked at the highest performing teams in factory workplaces and found that particularly those that had fewer episodes of absenteeism and that were able to recover when the line went down badly or when, you know, something wasn't working, were those in which swearing was taken seriously as a social signal, either that someone needed some extra help or someone's feeling a bit frustrated or it really is time to work a bit harder now. Whereas if you just permanently pepper everything, you know, use it basically as punctuation, it doesn't have a stronger signal. Right, right. So you've got to choose carefully when you use your swear words. I mean, anecdotally, I can't remember which military figure it was, but his subordinates always knew it was trouble when he stopped swearing. And again, there is kind of research on that, that when you look at a lot of things, retrospectives of either black box recordings or people who've been surgeons, who've been carrying out surgeries, that the people who were usually quite swearing when they stopped swearing is usually a sign that their stress levels have now gone beyond the ability to make clear decisions or to think clearly. So if someone suddenly goes very quiet, again, my family knows when I've done something really bad, I don't know what we're doing. Just don't say anything. Oh, we moved into a new house and I didn't realize there were those sort of sticky mouse traps. Oh, the really, really, yeah. I put my hand on one and it also had a bit of mousetail left on it. And my housemate said, he just heard me go, oh, that's not good. I knew. It was beyond swearing. It was genuinely not good. Because, yeah, this was, oh, that's not good. And also I came off my bike just over a year ago and I hit. Cycling. Cycling, yeah. And knocked myself unconscious in my last thought. I remember before the darkness, this one looked me up, was, well, this isn't good. I thought, this is so off-brand. I was very annoyed with myself. That's a moment to swear, but like, oh, shit. It was really sad that both my daughter's first moments in this world and what I thought were going to be my last moments in the world had to no swearing whatsoever. So I'm just a massive hypocrite is what we can take from that. Crazy, that's crazy. Why did the kids find it so funny? I've got, I swore the other day on, well, I just swore. I can't remember why. I was about to do a half marathon and my mate was coming and we were like, oh, shit, we better go. And then there was like, we paused. And then like, I think, yeah, it's the pause. I realized it was me. I was like paused. And then, and then the two kids, and then the two kids looked and they were like, shit, shit. It maybe was me. It's the emotional power that the words have. And the best thing you can do if you don't want to have them pick the word up is to not draw attention to it. Yeah, yeah. It's too late now. But it's too late at once. And the best, absolutely the best thing you can do. And again, brilliant research on this from a couple in the States, the Jays, Professor and Professor Jay. I can't remember. We're gonna have to put all of these studies in the show notes later. Absolutely. But they looked at the best ways of dealing with swearing and saying to your child, never let me hear you swear. All that doesn't mean that they swear, but not around you. Where we're sitting down and talking to your children about and going, sounds like you're having some very strong feelings right now. And I think that works in two ways. First of all, they understand that there are other ways of expressing their feelings and what it was that triggered the swearing. But also they don't wanna swear because they know it's gonna lead to a half hour deep meaning full of other feelings. But it's also not the done thing. Like if I went to my mate's house and my kids started swearing, like dang me that I haven't put your kids up well. And swearing. Like this is the thing we still think that, you know, for some reason. It's all socially accepted. Yeah. For a parent to let their kids swear without you saying something. Yeah. Like you feel like you gotta say, don't say that. Whereas, yeah, I still think saying, you know, why did you say that? It's always a good one. But they're always laughing after it. They are. They said it because it's funny. It's like, poo, poo, shit. I know. My daughter told me the other day that her and her friend just got a frenemy. She's three and a half. She's got a frenemy. This is depressing. But they were sitting under the table and they were hiding from their teacher and they were saying bum bum to each other. And I said, why were you saying bum bum to each other? Were you saying it to make the other person angry or sad? Or were you doing it to make each other laugh? Was it to make each other laugh? And I was like, well, that's fine. You know, yes, your teacher doesn't want to hear it. Yes, please don't teach it to the toddlers because you're preschoolers now. You have certain responsibilities to the young ones. Let's say. Just laying it on thick. But yeah, it's like, why are you doing it? And I would much rather that, you know, the kids swear than that they actually just be mean to each other. Yeah. And let's be honest, they're gonna swear. They are. At some point in their life. Yeah. They might as well start early. Absolutely. It's like, drink, drugs, alcohol, sex, swearing. Good at being early. You just, you just, you really want them to kind of learn about it from you and not make the dumb ass mistakes that you made growing up. But you also know that at some point they're going to make a highly, because you don't learn things from people telling you stuff. You learn things through emotional experiences. That's true. Your life lessons. Yeah, that's very true. And you don't want Peppa Pig teaching them either. No. No. No. No. Oh, poor henpeck, Daddy Peck. I've watched far too much of that, I think. Oh, watch Do You Know with Maddie Moat, which is brilliant. I haven't seen that. That's brilliant. That and Octonauts. I've learnt an awful lot of marine biology from Octonauts. Oh, that's two good stuff. Maddie Moat, I now know how wax crayons are made and how glass is made. And it's absolutely fascinating. And my daughter absorbs it like a sponge because she's the right age for it. And then she tells me this stuff back about whale sharks or how fish cakes are made. They do remember a lot. They do. And it's brilliant. They do remember a lot. But then a lot of parents don't want their kids to watch stuff. Yeah. We had a conversation recently where a parent said that we don't know how kids watch any TV. See, screen time. And I was like, oh, shit. I was probably watching a little bit too much. Well, I'm reading a load of studies on this at the moment. Oh, are you? Yeah. The scientific view. Which is going to be on kids' brains and how they change throughout childhood. So just sitting and watching TV doesn't help with acquiring language or social skills or anything, but watching programming that's specifically designed for particularly preschoolers with an interested adult is really helpful. With the adult watching with them. But it's the parent being there watching it with them. Really? Why is that? So it's the discussions that you have while watching. So putting that stuff into context. So my daughter is now really fed up of me ruining all the fairy stories. But why doesn't Cinderella's glass slip when I turn back at midnight? Like the rest of it, I don't understand this. Why is it that they didn't change at midnight? Mama, just tell a story. But actually having those sorts of conversations, you do end up sort of indoctrinating your kids into the kind of thought that you tend to have without meaning to. But you hear yourself back. But it's better to let them start to think for themselves, right? It is, but by asking questions, by prompting lines of thought. So why? It's a nice open questions. Why is Quassey so scared? Cause he's utterly neurotic. So real lazy parenting, let's say in inverted commas, he's just sticking your kid in front of the TV. You go chill out on your phone somewhere on Instagram and they're watching pepper or something is bad. It's the any time when, not any time, but there is something called the 30 million word gap, which is probably wildly exaggerated. But there was a study done in the mid 90s looking at the amount of speech directed at children that children hear. And they found that between the families that spoke most with their children and the families that spoke least with their children, by the time those children got to school, the ones who've been spoken to most have 30 million words more that they'd heard directed to them than the ones who were spoken to least. Because we know that kids can't don't learn language from overheard speech. They only learn it from speech, from conversations that you have with them. That direct speech. That's why you can't just stick them in front of French TV and hope that they'll become bilingual. You have to be having these conversations. Yes, yeah. And that gap is then correlated with how well they do when they get to school, even not just how well they can express themselves and how well they can understand language, but also how good they are at abstract thought, how good they are at mathematics, how good they are at just sitting and paying attention to what someone's saying. So it used to be that this was highly correlated with socioeconomic status. So people who had the most stressful lives, who were on benefits or were scrabbling from uncertain paycheck to uncertain paycheck for obvious reasons, do not have time to spend an hour when they get home from work, having a teddy bears picnic with their kids. It's like you're desperately, and the house I grew up in was like that. You're just trying to stay afloat. Whereas a comfortable middle class like me, we can sit and we can watch optinauts together because I pay someone to do my cleaning. I, we can go around the supermarket together slowly because I don't have to work on the weekends. We can have all of these conversations because I'm so fucking privileged. But that big gap is starting to be less correlated with socioeconomic status and more correlated with how long parents spend on their phones. And the time that you spend with your kid, particularly in that first year, when they're not talking to you, but you're talking to them, it's so important that you talk to them because that's what teaches them language. There are some other fantastic studies about how caregivers talk to their kids during various different activities. And reading it, I got like this kind of flashback to maternity leave, but you use the same essentially sort of 20, 30 words over and over again while you're doing nappy changes and another 20 or 30 while you're having a bath and another 20 or 30 while you're eating and more, but the same sort of ones while you're reading books, you know, doggy, piggy, et cetera. And it's that regularity, that sheer mind-numbing repetition that kind of kills you in that first year. But it's that that teaches them language. I love that. Why is it that people talk to babies like babies? Ah, this is great. It kind of annoys me, but I don't know if I should have known me other than that. It will annoy you as an adult because it's not designed for you to hear. But, oh, so this is the chance that I get to have a go at Stephen Pinker. So there's this one study and it's barely even worth the name of a study. It's one person was interviewed in New Jersey, but a black American woman, I think, I'm not sure gender is disclosed, but she's not even a caregiver. She's not a main caregiver of any child. And she said, you know, I don't see why and none of my friends see why we should talk to children in this stupid way. They don't know anything yet. Wait until they've learned stuff and then you can start asking them questions. And for years, Pinker and other Chomskyites have been going, oh, you see, there is something magic in babies' brains that means that they learn language because they can't possibly learn it from the way that adults talk it because adults speak in a way that is disjointed and degenerate and messed up and grammar's all wrong and they have these horrible run-on sentences like this one that no baby could ever make sense of. But for 20 years before Chomsky posited this, there've been women doing research on women who had been raising children going mother, it was even called motherese. So we now know that dads talk like this and grandads and grandmas and nursery workers and everybody talks like this to kids even if you feel like a dick doing it. And that the way we speak to kids is not the way we speak to adults. Child directed speech is massively important and it's been found in every single culture in the world. So Chomsky and Pinker are going, it's just these white middle class women who do this. It's not, it's just that white middle class women were the first people studied to be doing it but it's found on every continent and it's found in all relationships of caregiving including older siblings. And the patterns of this speech are so brilliantly designed to extend something called prosody. So what are the rhythms of speech allow you to work out where the words begin and end? So when you go to Spain, if you speak Spanish, you can hear the words. If you don't speak Spanish, you hear a stream of noise and you have no idea where the words begin and end. That was a huge, like how is chunking done and that was one of the arguments for this innate grammar is that you couldn't possibly chunk because adult speech is continuous. Speech to babies is not, it's hugely exaggerated. There's also this idea that you wouldn't know which were the important words in a sentence. Well, child directed speech is hugely repetitious. We have this thing where we go, look at the doggie, the doggie, oh what a cute doggie. And you decide the word doggie is really important here. To emphasize it, yeah. To the extent that there was a study about 10 years ago where they were, we're gonna take the exact same pairs of sentences in Chinese, in Mandarin, have a Mandarin speaker speak them but she's gonna speak them as if she were speaking to an adult and then she's gonna speak them as if she was speaking to a child and there are things like, here is your bottle, get your bottle. This is a horse, what a big horse. So she's going in Mandarin, yeah. Here is a horse, what a big horse and then child directed, he's a big horse, what a big horse. And then they tested English speakers not who had never learned any Mandarin or any form of Chinese whatsoever on whether or not they'd learned any of these words and the ones that heard infant directed speech learned about 70% of the words just from hearing two sentences. The ones who heard adult directed speech didn't learn them at all. Wow. So we know even cross linguistically, there is something about that infant directed speech that allows you to pick out the important words that become the building blocks then of syntax of expression. And then later on pragmatics is a brilliant paper I haven't read all the way yet, I've only read the abstract but how kids teach their parents irony and sarcasm. And it's like, oh, okay, cool. I'm not the only one doing that. I love that. So you should speak like that to kids. It helps them, it really helps them, it is the scaffolding that allows them to make sense of what you're saying. And it is the reason why they pick out swear words because swear words have their own prosody. They tend to be louder, more exaggerated, often said either very slowly or very quickly. My daughter, I know has- Do you speak to her differently still? I still speak up, mm. I do. Now this is interested in loads of research on how parents changed the way they speak to their kids and they thought that this would be on a month to month basis. Quite often it's on a day-to-day basis as they're learning language. So you start by using largely single words or pairs or triplets of words. Then you start to use more complicated things as they start to say pairs or triplets of words. Then you start to ask questions as they start proffering words. And then as they start asking questions, you start answering them differently. And I'm at the stage of something called recasts and you probably are too, which is when your kids say something that's right but slightly ungrammatical. I bided this from the shop. Oh, you bought that from the shop, did you? And you don't notice you're doing it, but you don't say, don't say buy, did say bought. You just don't, because all that does is make kids not want to speak. If you try to do formal prescriptive grammar at them, they just go, I don't know how to do it. You just reply with, oh, you bought that, did you? I'm talking about the cell assemblies earlier. What you're doing then is you're creating, you're kind of going, okay, you have this pattern of activation that is to do with you having previously purchased an item, I am replacing the sounds that go with that. You have bided, I'm telling you it's bought, but you don't say that, it's called recasting, it's a repeat but why you repeat it correctly. But then the tone of your voice is that the same as if you were to speak to me or? See, this is the thing, because I wouldn't expect to recast for you being an adult speaker of your native language, but I guess if you said, oh, you bought these microphones. Or I saw John yesterday, and you mean you saw James yesterday? Oh, right, yeah, oh, yeah, see there. And again, you can hear that you put more emphasis on James because I'm contradicting you. And I think it's, I would have to see if anyone's actually studied the prosody of this, because it's very labor intensive, you have to record hours and hours of people speaking to their kids. Get some AI to do that. Yeah, I mean, you can do that for looking for stuff in transcripts, you've got a tone of voice, it's so hard. But yeah, I'm trying to think, at least anecdotally, it's like, oh, I bided this, oh, you bought that, did you? I think bought, you probably go up in tone and. Yeah, it's interesting, I mean, think about it a lot. My sister has a young kid and she still speaks to him like a baby, because he's the baby. And then as your kids get older, I'm now having proper conversations with my five-year-olds, like proper chats. How come this is like that? And how come the sky's blue and why is this? And then you actually have to really sit down and answer properly. Oh, my favorite one, my favorite response to that is, I don't know, how could we find out? Good answer. And because I'd rather that than bullshit. Apart from a bedtime, my daughter knows that why is my crib tonight. And it's, I can't, I find it really hard not to at least respond to a question. And so she'll be trying to go to sleep and she'll come up with things like, mommy, why are their feet? It's like, what? Go to sleep. Don't answer it. What do you mean, why are their feet? Why do I have feet? What would you walk on if you didn't have, no, you're trolling me now. I know you're trolling me. In other words, the other day, she was flailing her legs around, going for something about her toes. And then she went, oh, mama, my feet just kicked me in the face. And it's like, I had to leave her room. So I'm like, if I'm just sitting here crying with laughter, that's not gonna help you. It's great. You're obviously, and you're teaching your daughter to really engage in conversation. She is so conversational. And they didn't teach that at school. Art of conversation, interacting with people, these kinds of things are brilliant, sir. Yeah. I mean, the school at the five year old is going to, they're trained very hard to do that. And largely because of this, that there is occasionally a conversational deficit in kids who arrive at school. And there's a program called Every Child a Talker, which I think is still slightly controversial. But this idea of getting kids to sit in, sometimes called circle time, but to talk about a thing. Yeah, to talk about a thing that is important to them. The thing they do at her school is they've turned to your partner and discuss it. And I didn't do that until I got to university. You know, lecturers would go, are you still talking great, it's about two or three. And then we'll take some answers. But this idea of having to lobby for your point of view, like it's brilliant when you have two kids in the same house, because they have a lot of practice. If you think they don't allow snatching, throwing, biting, you're kicking. It's like, you know, you have to sort this out with words. They get very good at it. It's amazing skill. Then Mikey does show and tell at school. Yes. Which is really good as well. But then also they have to learn to listen to whoever's talking. And then, so those things are great. Yeah. And they're starting to come through. Yeah. And I think that schools have realized that this is not just about conversation, that your ability to process, understand, recast information, conversation is really at the fundamentals of all of that. Oh yeah. No massively. Listening to your kids, talking to your kids and even taking their attempts at conversation seriously before they can speak. There's again, paper I haven't read yet. It's sitting on my printer at home. I meant to bring it with me to read on the tube on the way back, never mind. And it's called motion ease. Motion ease. Motion ease. So how adept parents are at spotting when their child's attention shifts. Oh, you've seen it. You know, you've seen a doggy. You've seen a horsey, but you're so attuned while your child is so tiny to them suddenly like looking over there or pointing at a thing. And parents who respond more fluently to motion ease to their kids, you know, demonstrating even with facial expressions that they're bored or interested or happy or cross tend to have earlier talkers because these children seem to understand that their attempts to be understood will be taken seriously. So even paying attention to, you know, they studied largely mothers because it's usually sort of mothers in maternity leave who have the time to show up to these lamps. But just basically you can split mothers into, they spend their time going, look at the glasses. Look at my glasses. Look at the things. Stop what you're doing and look at my thing. Or, oh, what is it you're interested in? What is it you're looking at? And then you follow them up six months later. And the ones who followed what their kids were interested in, their children were much more verbal than the ones where their parents had gone, look at the flashcard. Look at the doggie. Do the, look, I bought these educational resources. Pay attention to them. It's like, don't talk about what your kid is interested in. Yeah, that's true. And now I get, daddy, you're not listening to me. Oh, I have been listening to you for the last hour. Yes, when you're going to get to the point. Yeah, I know it's tricky. It is very tricky. I can't, there's someone who does me and I feel like I can't really criticize my daughter for not getting to the point quickly. No, it's great. It is. Well, thank you so much for speaking to me on the podcast. It's awesome. You're welcome. To finish it while your first pick's available online. Yes, yeah. And then you're... On all good big stores. On all good big stores. And you're finishing your second one now? I'm about halfway through the second one now, but that won't be out until, I think, June 2021 because of the length of time it takes to be used. So we'll get you back in to speak about that one. It's going to be great. But yeah, if you want to know why we know that chimpanzees swear or if you want to know who does swear and when or why stroke victims can still swear, something that more people who have relatives, you've had strokes or dementia should know about. That is crazy. When I read that, I'm just gonna... Yeah, it's... The number of people who've come up to me afterwards after a talk and have gone, I didn't realize that. And now it makes a lot of sense. I just, I feel like whenever you have people who are caring for people with strokes or dementia pointing out that they're going to become more sweary, it doesn't mean they suddenly hate you. It's really important. A very, very sad story that a producer on a radio program told me which was that her father had had a stroke and hadn't said anything particularly coherent in all the time since until they all went out for a family picnic and a red kite swooped down and stole his sandwich and he went fucking bastard. But her mom was devastated. It's like he hasn't told me he loves me. He has, he doesn't say my name, but he can swear at this bird. And it's like that's because the parts of the brain that produce that kind of language are much more diffuse and have been spared the stroke, whereas his ability to construct a sentence, being able to tell you how he feels has been devastated. So it's not that he doesn't love you. It's just that it's so much easier to tell a bird to go fuck itself. I'm really sorry. Someone should have told you that. So yeah, there's all kinds of stuff like that. Amazing. Awesome. Thank you so much. I hope you get home quicker than you got here and speak soon. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Awesome. Hey folks, thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe in all the usual places.