Smart people do a lot of things that look stupid from the outside. Two of the most well-documented ones involve habits you’ve probably been told to knock off since childhood—and if you’ve spent any time feeling even slightly embarrassed about either of them, a growing body of peer-reviewed research would like to offer some belated vindication.

Researchers studying language, cognition, and verbal processing have identified behaviors that actually correlate with higher cognitive ability but get routinely mistaken for the opposite. Two of the most well-supported ones involve habits that a lot of smart people have been apologizing for their entire lives.

Talking to Yourself Out Loud

The cultural assumption is that people who talk to themselves are, at best, a little unhinged. Science disagrees.

A 2012 study by Gary Lupyan and Daniel Swingley, published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, had participants search for a specific object among a group of images. Some were told to repeat the object’s name out loud while they searched. Others stayed silent. The group that spoke found their target significantly faster. Lupyan and Swingley called this the label feedback hypothesis: verbal labels don’t just describe the world, they actively change how we perceive it.

When you vocalize a word, two systems fire at once—language production and auditory processing—and that combination actively sharpens how the brain tracks what it’s looking for. A 2023 review in Frontiers in Psychology found self-talk woven through a surprisingly wide range of mental functions, from working memory and task-switching to self-regulation and higher-order cognitive management.

What comes off as eccentric is, neurologically speaking, efficient. People who do it naturally may have stumbled onto one of the more reliable ways to keep their thinking sharp without ever knowing that’s what they were doing.

Swearing

Swearing has a reputation problem that science doesn’t really support. People who curse are assumed to be working around a limited vocabulary, and a 2015 study in Language Sciences by Kristin and Timothy Jay spent considerable effort dismantling that assumption.

Participants who scored highest on a standard verbal fluency test also produced the most swear words when asked to list them. Those with the weakest vocabularies produced the fewest. The same cognitive resource behind a rich general lexicon also expands the taboo one.

Researcher Timothy Jay, who has studied profanity for over four decades, argues that swear words carry emotional precision that ordinary language simply can’t replicate. Deploying one well requires reading social context, understanding register, and exercising real linguistic judgment. That’s not a limited vocabulary. That’s a sophisticated one.

There’s always a catch, though: a 2018 study in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology found that people rate swearers as less intelligent and less trustworthy across the board, personal feelings about profanity aside. So, even though science says you’re smart, people are still judgy as hell.