Why Some Words Feel Soft?

Superior Temporal Gyrus (STG) – a brain region located in the upper part of the temporal lobe, involved in processing auditory information and the perception of speech. It plays a central role in distinguishing sounds, interpreting language, and integrating audiovisual input. The STG is also implicated in higher-order functions like social cognition, prosody (the emotional tone of speech), and phonological mapping.

Sometimes people ask me how I know when a story I’ve written is finished, and I usually say it’s intuition. But honestly, that’s not true. The real answer is stranger, which is probably why I’ve never said it out loud. The truth is, I feel the texture of the text, and that’s how I know if it’s ready.

I don’t remember when I first noticed it. Maybe it’s been there since I started writing. But every story I write has a texture. In the beginning, the words always feel soft (I did warn this would sound strange). When they first appear on the page, they’re sticky, like an egg before it’s cooked. And honestly, that’s my favorite part. Everything is flexible, and the sentences can slide freely across the page.

Over time, I feel the words begin to harden. Slowly, with each sentence that starts to work, the language becomes firmer, more structured, like clay beginning to hold its shape. At a certain point, things stop being so easy to shift. And by the final stage, the text feels solid, like stone. Moving a single sentence can feel like moving a mountain. And that’s when I know: the story is done.

And then, each story has its final texture. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that my novel Mrs. Lillenbloom’s Cloud Factory has a cloudy texture. But Debby’s Dream Housemight have a mechanical texture, while Exit feels more like liquid. I know it sounds strange, but when I’m deep in the writing process, I don’t just choose words for their meaning, I sense them in a physical, almost tactile way.

Okay, here’s a question:If I told you that one of these shapes is called Kiki and the other is called Buba, could you guess which is which?Try it, I promise you’ll soon see where I’m going with this.

As I got further into my studies in cognitive neuroscience, I began to understand that maybe my inner feeling isn’t entirely irrational. In fact, a version of it was discovered nearly a century ago in what is now known as the Bouba Kiki effect. In the original experiment, people were shown two unfamiliar shapes, the same ones you saw a few sentences ago, and asked to match them with two nonsense words: bouba and kiki. Across cultures and languages, most people intuitively matched bouba with the round shape and kiki with the jagged one. It is not just a nice anecdote, it actually suggests that there is a deep-rooted link between sound and shape in the human brain.

What fascinated me even more was learning that in recent years, researchers have begun to uncover the neural mechanisms behind this phenomenon. A study using fMRI has shown that in particular, the Superior Temporal Gyrus, a region involved in auditory perception and phonological analysis, is one of the brain areas that respond differently to sounds like bouba and kiki, suggesting it plays a key role in mapping sound features onto broader sensory representations. This means the brain does not just hear these sounds, it associates certain syllables with shape, texture, and even motion. This suggests that the Bouba Kiki effect relies on a broader network that links sensory perception with higher order integration.

So maybe my habit of feeling the texture of words is not so strange after all. Maybe it is just another way the brain lets language move through us, not just as sound or meaning, but as sensation. And my sense that my stories have textures might not be so strange after all.

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