To keep the feces from flying, the researchers potty train the chimps, and they've found that the chimps soon become ashamed if they screw up the process. That's a problem for scientists who want to teach chimps sign language, and want to bring chimps into a facility to live with them in order to do that.
Our evolutionary cousins, the chimpanzees, also swear when given the opportunity, and they do it in a way that's similar to humans.Ĭhimps express a significant amount of their displeasure with one another by throwing their feces. will use in the same way that we use our taboo terms, - Emma Byrne author of "You're modelling what someone else's emotions are likely to be. So when you're doing swearing in a sort of deliberate and for-effect kind of way, it's actually using so many different parts of the brain at once." "You're not just using that emotional part of your own brain," Byrne says. Jackson), left, and Vincent Vega (John Travolta), right, amongst them. In Pulp Fiction, the characters swear 429 times, Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. When a person is in pain, they may conjure a blue streak to demonstrate their agony to others. Another person might swear to show that they understand the suffering that has taken place. "If people have strokes that pretty much decimate their ability to use language at all, they can still swear in a really fluent and effective manner."īyrne's new book is called Swearing Is Good For You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language. In it, she examines how swearing evolved from the earliest days of human language and how we've honed it into an essential part of our culture.Īnd as you might expect, she has a favourite curse word.Ĭlick the listen button below if you'd like to hear it.īyrne says that one of the most important things about swearing is that it's often performative. "One of the amazing things about swearing that's different to the rest of our language is how much it pulls on the emotional centres of the brain," Byrne tells Day 6 host Brent Bambury. Sailors, chimpanzees and rowdy teenagers have one vocal tick that unites them: a love of swearing.Ĭomputational neuroscientist Emma Byrne loves foul language too, and she says there's a strong scientific defense for letting the f-bombs fly.
0 kommentar(er)
