Hi, we've got three stories from Curiosity.com to help it get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you'll learn about a vintage quiz that can tell you how much self-esteem you have,

the difference between male and female brains brains and the words that make you say

um let's satisfy some um curiosity see what I did there I see what's your favorite

filler word I do say um a lot do you yeah yeah of course I do you're you're the editor here man when we are recording you're I'm the editor here man when we were recording yeah I don't I haven't noticed it too much all right well that's good actually

I didn't mean to do that.

First up today is a new study that found which words make you say

um or ah or em or e m or ere or whatever we heard guttural filler words that you say.

So this is a kind of a weird thing to find, right?

But researchers looked at speech from native speakers of a broad range of languages

to see what speech patterns they might have in common,

and they found that filler words like um etc tended to happen the most before references to concrete objects and concepts.

And if you remember grammar school, that means nouns.

The researchers think it's because when you use a noun, it's usually because you're introducing a new concept into the conversation.

And you can also delay naming a noun by using a pronoun.

So let's say you say the sentence,

my dog went outside and played fetch.

Well, if you haven't already mentioned your dog,

then you might have to slow down the flow of the conversation

to redirect the topic when you're using that noun.

...