We all know people who hate the word moist, but why are they okay with synonyms like damp or muggy or wet?

What's going on in their brains? And what does this have to do with shapes or autism or synesthesia?

Welcome to another episode of Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman, all about the magical

three pounds of matter that constitute your reality.

Yeah. that constitute your reality. In today's episode, we're going to talk about a wild and relatively new example of the differences between people's internal cosmoses.

We're going to talk about word aversion.

Imagine that you find a tribe of people with little contact with the outside world, and they show you that they have some shapes that they draw. One of them is a round

blobby object and another shape is a sharp, spiky star pattern. Now, you figure out that one of these

they call buba and the other they call kiki. And the question I have for you is, which do you think is which?

Is the blobby thing called Kiki and the starburst thing is called Buba? Or would you guess it's

the other way around? If you are like essentially everyone else on the planet, you guessed that

the blobby object was called Bba and the sharp object was called Kiki.

Now, the Buba Kiki effect was something studied in a psychology paper a century ago.

And it was a little surprising because essentially everybody gives the same answer,

linking the soft sounding word with the soft-looking object and vice versa. But this is surprising

because in general there's really not supposed to be a relationship between the sound of a word

and what it looks like.

But what this tells us is that we sometimes have relationships across the senses.

And if you heard my episode on synesthesia, episode four,

you'll know that a fraction of people, probably between 5 and 10%, have this kind of blending of the senses in more unusual ways.

For example, they might see letters and that triggers a color experience for them.

Or they might hear something and that triggers a visual shape for them.

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