J. Davidson - Planet Word

On the outer layer of the brain is the neocortex, made up of folds of grey matter, which is responsible for higher functions like knowledge, conscious thought and reasoning. We process most of our language in the neocortex, but there are some words — curses and taboo words — which have strong emotional connotations (Timothy Jay’s emotional intensifiers ), and these are processed in a part of the limbic system called the amygdale. The amygdale is an almond-shaped mass of neurons at the front of the temporal lobe of the brain that appears to gives our memories emotion. Studies have shown that, if the amygdale is stimulated electrically, animals respond with aggression. If it’s removed, the animals become tamer and don’t react to things that would normally have angered or frightened them. In humans, brain scans show the amygdale light up, i.e. become active, when the person is shown a card with an unpleasant word, especially a taboo word, written on it.

‘The response is not only emotional but involuntary,’ writes Steven Pinker in his article ‘Why We Curse. What the F***?’ ‘It’s not just that we don’t have earlids to shut out unwanted sounds. Once a word is seen or heard, we are incapable of treating it as a squiggle or noise; we reflexively look it up in memory and respond to its meaning, including its emotional colouring.’

As Timothy Jay argues, once we’ve seen or heard these emotional intensifiers, we can’t erase them. And when things go wrong in the left hemisphere of the brain, where we process language, it’s those emotional words lodged in the deeper limbic system which we are still able to access.

The French poet Charles Baudelaire was visiting the ornate carved confessionals of a Belgian church when he felt dizzy, staggered and fell. By the time he had reached his carriage, the forty-five-year-old poet’s language had become confused — he asked for the window to be opened when he meant shut. ‘One of mankind’s greatest-ever language centres had started to die, for ever,’ as Peter Silverton put it in Filthy English . Baudelaire’s rich linguistic repository was cleared out. Within the month he could not speak at all — apart from one expression which, to the horror of the nuns who were looking after him, was the blasphemous curse cré nom ( sacré nom de Dieu ) — damn! The nuns thought Baudelaire had been possessed by the devil.

One hundred and fifty years later we know that Baudelaire had suffered a stroke. The blood flow to his brain had been cut off, causing damage to the language centres in the left hemisphere. This impairment of speech after a stroke is a condition known as aphasia. And the shouting of a single blasphemy, cré nom ? Well, around 15 per cent of people who have aphasia have verbal automatisms, brief unconscious utterings which are often, although not always, swear words.

Les Duhigg suffered a stroke fourteen years ago, aged forty-one. When he came round in hospital, the first thing he said was, ‘Where am I?’ Except that he didn’t actually say it. As Les recounts: ‘In my mind I’d say that, but nothing could come out and I was … dumbfounded, not able to speak for the first time in my life.’

He was, literally, dumbfounded. And then, a few days later, he uttered his first word, ‘FUCK!’, when he heard the doctors discussing moving him to a side ward in which another stroke victim had just died. It gave the doctors — and Les — quite a shock. Les hadn’t been much of a swearer before his stroke. It wasn’t that he was now putting swearing into normal speech but that swearing was the only word he could generate. It wasn’t ‘Pass the fucking cup of tea’, it was simply ‘fuck’.

For a while he used the f-word for everything, much to the embarrassment of his wife, Marion. ‘I was always apologizing for him, especially to the physiotherapist. But she’d worked with stroke people before and said it was a common thing.’

Les was unconsciously pulling out those emotional memorized words from the undamaged right side of his brain. He and Marion saw something similar happening with other patients.

Marion remembers: ‘We had a chap in the stroke group. He couldn’t speak, but if someone started singing a song and he knew it, he’d just join in with them. And we couldn’t make it out because he couldn’t speak properly and then all of a sudden he’d come out with singing.’

Singing songs learned as a child — like counting and nursery rhymes and swearing — is often automatic, and the patient can still produce the motor movements associated with a sequence, even though afterwards they can’t retrieve the appropriate words to say what it was they were singing.

Les had to learn to speak all over again. The involuntary cursing has stopped and, fourteen years later, speech therapy is helping his brain learn new pathways to reinvent language. ‘It’s like being born again,’ he says ‘starting off as a little kid.’

Les is a patient of Professor Cathy Price at University College London. To help explain what is happening in the brains of aphasia sufferers like Les she suggests performing an experiment on a guinea pig, Mr Stephen Fry. She wants to show that Les’s involuntary swearing wasn’t a grasping on to the only emotional, automatic words he could access; rather, the mechanism which allows people to inhibit words and actions in social situations had been damaged

Cathy’s plan is to wheel Stephen into an MRI scanner and record his brain patterns while he performs a Just a Minute routine — exactly like the long-running panel show on BBC radio, in which contributors have to speak for a minute on any given subject without hesitation, deviation or repetition. He is asked first of all to speak freely on various subjects that force him to use the left side of his brain, where information is stored. Sure enough, the scan shows the frontal lobes in the left hemisphere activating. Then he is given a variety of subjects to speak about without repetition, interspersed with bouts of counting. These scans are fascinatingly different. Although Stephen is still using the frontal lobes for the factual knowledge, a tiny little structure deep in the grey matter of his brain is flashing away. Cathy explains that this is called the left head of cordate within the basal ganglia structure, and one of its functions is as an inhibitor. The scans show it working hard as Stephen tries not to repeat his ‘taboo’ Just a Minute words — exactly as it does when one tries not to swear in front of children and old ladies.

Cathy compares this with what happens when someone who is bilingual is speaking — they have to focus on one language while suppressing the other one. Then she contrasts the MRI scan of Stephen’s brain during the Just a Minute routine with Les Duhigg’s brain scan. While the left head of cordate in the basal ganglia area — the inhibitor — lit up in Stephen’s scan, in Les’s it remained dark, damaged irreversibly during his stroke.

Brian Blessed’s Swear Box

Actor Brian Blessed is a prolific swearer. Turning the air blue comes as naturally to him as breathing; he makes Gordon Ramsay seem like a choir boy.

Brian agrees to join Stephen in an experiment conducted by Dr Richard Stephens, one of whose specialities is the connection between swearing and pain. He devised this test after noticing how his wife seemed to get natural pain relief from swearing during childbirth.

In the middle of the room is a fish tank, filled with ice. The point of the experiment is to plunge a hand into the icy water and see how long they can keep it in. The first time they are only allowed to repeat a single word that could be used to describe a table; Stephen’s is ‘functional’. The experiment begins: