As a child of the 70s, I only had 5 television channels to choose from as a kid. Therefore, I watched Sesame Street five times per week. I love so many of the characters. They all taught me quite a bit. One of my favorites was Count von Count (yes that is his full name... I looked it up.) As the name implies, he taught kids how to count. I was actually very excited to see that Count von Count is on display at the Smithsonian American History museum in Washington D.C. He's awesome! He deserves it.

As an adult, The Count is the star of one of the funniest videos I have ever seen on Youtube. It is simply brilliant. I laugh every time I watch it. Whoever created this video is a genius... and all they needed to do was add a "beep" every time The Count said a certain word. The result is hilarious...

I could bleep for hours. Bleep until I drop.

That song is clearly incredibly innocent. Why the heck did our brains make it so dirty?

The reason our brains are filling in such a dirty word every time there is a "beep" is because of something called the Phonemic restoration effect.

According to wikipedia, this is "a perceptual phenomenon where under certain conditions, sounds actually missing from a speech signal can be restored by the brain and may appear to be heard." This effect occurs when sounds are replaced by a noise (like a "beep"). When this happens, the brain naturally fills in the missing sound. In this case many people's brains fill in the missing sound with "THE word, the big one, the queen-mother of dirty words, the "F-dash-dash-dash" word!"

Ohhhhhh Fudge!

Apparently, what we hear can be affected by our experience. For example, age and gender may have an effect on how we "fill in the blank".

Thanks to the Phonemic restoration effect, humans are able to communicate with far less precision. This phenomenon allows us to fill in missing sounds as well as ignore extraneous ones while listening to a speaker.

The effect was first studied in 1970 by Richard M. Warren. He was trying to ascertain why speech could still be understood even if masked by noise.

As far as the neuroscience involved is concerned, many see this phenomenon as proof that the sense of hearing is similar to sight. Specifically, just like our brains fill in information when we see an optical illusion, our brains are also able to fill in missing phonemes (in this case with some very inappropriate phonemes).

Although the studies only targeted English speakers, it is believed that the effect is universal to all languages.

For more information, please check out the following article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_restoration_effect

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