Pronoun-Processing in the Brain

Why does using the right pronouns matter at the neuropsychological level? In the first study of its kind, researchers in the Netherlands have identified the neural process of how pronouns work. Working with patients suffering from severe epilepsy, researchers have discovered that specific neurons in the brain remember specific individuals. Each person in your life has a cell dedicated to them — all the more reason to remove toxic people from your life, as you literally don’t have the brain space! The same cells then also fire when the pronoun the brain thinks refers to the individual is mentioned. In using the sentence ‘Shrek walked into the bar. He asked for a drink’, the same cell which fires at ‘Shrek’ also fires at ‘He’. Each individual cell remembers the pronoun used to refer to the individual, and fires when either the pronoun or the individual is mentioned. 

These cells are known as concept cells and were first hypothesised as early as the 1800s. Psychologist William James proposed the idea of pontifical cells — brain cells containing all the information we had about a specific place, person, or thing. In 2004, neuroscientists at UCLA discovered the ‘Jennifer Aniston effect’. Epileptic patients were shown a range of photographs of Jennifer Aniston — as expected, whole constellations of neurons fired, but, when seeing Jennifer Aniston in any of her versatile avatars, there was always one specific neuron which fired more than the others. Repeating the experiment with other patients revealed a specific Halle Berry neuron, and so on, leading researchers to conclude that individual neurons in the brain must be responsible for individual people, or the concept of an individual. This finding that the pronoun used to refer to the individual triggers the same neuron drives home the importance of using the correct pronoun to refer to individuals, as these pronouns literally become part of the concept of them in your mind.

It's worth keeping in mind that research in this area is as nascent as it is divided. Indeed, animal research working with mice and monkeys continues to highlight the role of the entire cortex in recognising and responding to people in our lives. Other researchers have pointed out that the selectivity of these concept cells remains suspect. Furthermore, there’s still no way to understand the scope of these cells — just because some people in your life have concept cells doesn't mean everyone does, as this may not be an efficient way for the brain to store information. I was only joking about running out of brain space, you’re still welcome to use it as an excuse though. 

All this to say, we know that ensuring people feel seen is important, not simply because everyone has a right to be recognised as they want in public, but because how we refer to people is quite literally, also how we think about them. We also know that gender has always existed on a spectrum, indeed, this early research into the importance of pronouns is only the first step in bringing scientific research up to date with human history.  

Image by Wikipedia Commons