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Natasha Mitchell: So it was a grammatically incorrect piece of legislation anyway. Beautiful, beautiful. Steve, you've looked to the brain for an explanation. What do we know about how swearing engages the brain?

Steven Pinker: Swearing taps into different parts of the brain than ordinary articulate speech. This has been known for quite some time because often neurological patients who suffer a stroke to the parts of the brain that underlie language and become aphasic, unable to speak fluently, have no trouble with swearing. They can swear like a sailor even though they can't put an articulate sentence together. Neuro imaging studies have shown that taboo words light up primitive parts of the brain like the amygdala which responds to threatening stimuli, like an angry face or a dangerous animal.

Also the right hemisphere which we know plays less of a role in articulate language...typically, strokes to the right hemisphere don't make a person aphasic, but the right hemisphere seems to be more involved in swearing than the left hemisphere. It suggests that basically taboo words activate brain areas that are associated with negative emotion, disgust, with hatred, with revulsion at sexual depravity, with awe and fear of deities, and all of the topics that get turned into swear words in different languages all have something to do with strongly felt emotion.
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