Why I Chose to Study Cognitive Science
How do we think what we think? That is the central question of cognitive science. How does the brain produce consciousness? How do we gain and use knowledge, what mental processes underlie what we think, what we sense, what we know, and what we believe? This is otherwise known as cognition. Cognitive Science’s primary goal is to unravel the mystery of cognition.
As you will see, we can try to unravel this mystery in many ways.
What the F
This is the title of the textbook of my first cognitive science class, written by the professor, Dr. Benjamin Bergen; the very first line of this book is “This book is about bad language.” Yes, one of the very first courses I took at UCSD, and in specific the first class offered by the cognitive science department I took, was a class I affectionately refer to as “the swearing class”. Named “An Uncensored Introduction to Language”, this class indeed was all about profanity — its history, how it appears in different cultures, what makes the best profanity (linguistic and cultural commonalities in profanity), what we see in the brain when we swear, you name it. It was a class on the science of profanity.
Little Samoan Potty Mouths
This class did not teach us how to swear — or how to swear better, for those who swear profusely, such as myself. No, it taught us the intricacies of language. For instance, how our expectations affect what words we hear and what words become prevalent across languages. This is evident in the fact that more than half of languages around the world have words for “mother” that contain the letters “m” or “n” (52%) and a greater proportion (55%) of languages have words for “father” that contain the syllabus “pa”, “po”, “ta”, and “to” (Bergen, 2016). While learning to talk, babies babble; what sounds do they usually make when they babble? Sounds like “mama”, “papa”, and “dada”. Parents expect their child’s first words to be ones that refer to themselves. Thus, this is a case of how our languages are influenced by our expectations.
Interestingly, this led to a very strange phenomenon in one culture. In Samoa, every parent reports their child’s first word to be the same profane word. The Samoan word for s@!#. Yes, you read that right; every child’s first word in Samoa is a profane word for feces. Or more precisely, an abbreviation of an expression that means “Eat s@!#”. And one explanation as to why this is not put the blame on the parents: they are not the ones with the potty mouths.
In Samoan culture, it is customary for older children to take care of their younger siblings after a certain age when they are dependent on their mothers for nourishment and care. This word, this abbreviation for “Eat s@!#”, is something that older kids do know and say with each other. The belief goes, then, that the younger children are picking up this profane word from the adolescent caregivers. When we also consider the fact that after a certain age, our primary source of vocabulary comes from outside the household/parents and rather our peers/siblings — which is seen across cultures — this explanation seems as clear as day.
However, as it turns out, the most likely answer does lie in the parents; not their behavior, not their use of this one word, but in their expectations. In Samoan culture, children are viewed as unruly, socially destructive, and uncontrollable — more so than in other cultures. Since parents in this culture have this belief, and the words for “mother”, ”father”, and “s@!#” all start with the sound that “k” makes (we will see more about how phonetics influence our word choice later), the parents let their expectations get the best of them.
The Holy Priest with the Vulgar Tongue
Through this class, we learned that language in the brain is more than it seems. For decades, neuroscientists have stood by the belief there are two language areas in the brain; I’m sure if you’ve studied psychology, you have heard of them: Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. These two regions of the outer layer of the brain — called the neocortex — are responsible for two key aspects of language: production and comprehension. Language production, supervised by Broca’s area, is how we construct sentences (syntax) and connect them. Without intact language production, you aren’t to speak. Language comprehension is our ability to understand language, where our vocabulary rests. A weird phenomenon occurs when Wernicke’s area is damaged: the individual has intact, fluent speech — it just makes no sense. Word salad, as it's called. For decades, neuroscientists have stood by the belief that language is controlled by these two areas, or modules, and nothing else.
At least, this is what a modular view of the brain tells us. However, this is not the whole story of language. But, why is it not the whole story? Well, you guessed it: because profanity has largely been ignored in the study of language. Then I learned about one neuroscientist: Jaques Lordat. This neuroscientist suffered a stroke that left him unable to speak. He was able to rehabilitate himself, and he recorded what it was like to lose language (a personal account), as well as recorded the objective facts of his case for the scientific community to learn from. After his stroke and rehabilitation, Lordat began to study patients like him, who had strokes that impacted their language abilities. This is where the story of the profane priest begins.
A French priest suffered a devastating stroke that almost completely wiped out his language production capacities. He was left with the ability to utter two words. Yes, only two, and those were the French words for “I” and “F@#%”. I’m sure you can fill in that second word, and this word tells us a lot more about language than most language research pays attention to. This is because this word, described as “the most forceful oath of the tongue” by Lordat, a lot of the time is not uttered intentionally. People swear reflexively. Ever stub your toe and yell “the most forceful oath of the tongue”? Well, that is your brain exercising the language pathway that is responsible for automatic language. Whereas the language centers — Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area — are responsible for our intentional use of language, research has found the structures in the basal ganglia and the limbic system to be the culprit for unintentional, emotional language, such as expletives.
The basal ganglia are a collection of structures that select appropriate motor actions and suppress those that we don’t want to perform. Additionally, the limbic system is a collection of structures that are highly involved in emotion; it is also referred to as the emotional brain. These two collections are very close in the brain, both in location and process.
In the healthy brain, the basal ganglia generally suppress our urge to swear out of anger, which the limbic system makes us want to do. In people whose basal ganglia are malfunctioning — such as those with Tourette’s — they may make uncontrollable motor actions, such as some who uncontrollably swear; but their intentional speech is on point. On the contrary, those whose language centers do not work, cannot intentionally speak, even though they know what they want to say and know how to — they are trapped inside. However, when they get frustrated because they have trouble communicating, they can blurt out a “F@#$!” with little hesitation. Thus, language is not as simple as you think it may be, especially not in the brain.
What Makes a Four-Letter Word?
Even how words sound and how they are written influence how we choose our words, and how we react to them; this is illustrated perfectly by Bergen, by presenting the fact that A LOT of profane words are four letters. When compared to the distribution of other words in English, the contrast is striking: of a list of 84 words in each group (84 words randomly selected from exclusively profanity or English as a whole), 29 profane words were four letters, whereas only 12.6 words on average had four letters in the whole language. Although this may not appear “striking”, when taking into consideration that longer words were a rare occurrence in profane words (excluding a few exceptions) and these same word lengths as English as a whole a relatively statistically normal distribution, it does raise some eyebrows and does pique our interest.
So why four letters? Well, of course, we can only make speculations here. But we can make pretty good speculations based on research. For instance, another correlation we see with profane words relates to their frequency of use. Shorter words are used more often. This is the same with English’s top 10% most frequently used words; again, there is a noticeable uptick in the four-letter words in profanity than the top 10%. This doesn’t explain or really even begin to explain why four-letter words are more frequent in English swears, but it does narrow our focus.
How does the word’s sound contribute to its profane nature? That is a question we have not answered yet. Monosyllabic, shorter words seem to be the answer. In this context, we mean shorter in sound, not the length of the word. Monosyllabic words can be articulated with one breath; however, syllables are not the only things that contribute to a word’s sound, and to the distribution of profane words being skewed towards four-letter words, it seems. Another contributor is the sounds of the letters themselves: profane words have been more frequently found to hover around words that end in hard, explosive constant sounds. Those such as “k”,”t”,and “g”. Take a minute to pronounce these sounds themselves in an exaggerated fashion, and do the same with sounds like “ah”, “oh”, “s” and “m”. Do you notice how much more forcefully you can expel the former sounds? Since you generally use profane words to convey strong emotions, a forceful “k” sound at the end of “F@%k!” makes perfect sense. Do you understand why Lordat called “f**k” “the most forceful oath of the tongue” now?
So, what is Cognitive Science Exactly?
Just this one class covered so many aspects of cognitive science, but of course, the topics the course covered was not all of what cognitive science is. So, you might ask, what is cognitive science, exactly? Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field that studies cognition, and each of its fields contributes to finding answers to the questions we have about cognition. It consists of philosophy, psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, anthropology, and neuroscience — where my expertise lies. To me, Cognitive Science is the study of people — how we do what we do and why we do what we do. Who we were, are, and will be; and to me, neuroscience plays a central role in every one of these questions.
The brain is the controller of the body; without it, life would not be possible. Thus neuroscience, the study of the brain and its fundamental units is crucial to the study of cognition. With an understanding of the brain’s structure and its processes, we can do so much in the study of cognition. We can develop technologies to enhance our senses, abilities, and minds. We can develop effective treatments for neurological and psychiatric diseases, some extremely debilitating and devastating. We can even use this knowledge in pursuit of other goals, like improving artificial intelligence (AI) or explaining what psychology alone cannot.
Cognitive Science: Only the Beginning
From its inception to its makeup, to how we all experience cognition, cognitive science is a marvel, in and of itself. Whether you’re interested in the brain, language, culture, computer science, or swearing, cognitive science has it all. And this barely scratches the surface of what cognitive science is. With all this in mind, you may begin to wonder: What makes someone — such as myself — study this vast field, and all of these questions, which seem to have no answers? Well, I hope I can give you a satisfactory answer: all it takes is one class, one book.
Reference
Bergen, B. K. (2016). What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves. Basic Books.
