Words Can Change Your Brain (12 page)

If you want to increase your ability to resonate and empathize with someone else, just use your imagination. When a person is speaking, imagine you are them. Mentally visualize yourself in the situation they describe, and put in as much detail as possible, as if you were actually there. According to researchers at the University of Chicago, this form of mental simulation allows your brain to build a better understanding of the other person, and it doesn’t matter if what you imagine is accurate.
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It even works with novels and movies, for the more you can project yourself into the role of the character, the more you’ll feel compassion or, in the case of a villain, fear and disgust.
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As António Damásio and his research team at the University of Southern California emphasize, when one actively projects oneself “into the shoes of another person, imagining someone’s personal, emotional experience as if it were one’s own,” one triggers “the neural mechanism for true empathy.”
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Can we train ourselves to feel compassion toward everyone? Yes, but it appears that we have a neurological mechanism that stops us from empathizing with people we don’t like or respect. This “antimirror neuron” activity, as some researchers call it, appears to deactivate
the brain’s propensity to imitate another person.
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Thus when we interact with someone whose behavior violates our personal ethics and beliefs, our empathy circuits shut down to ensure that we do not engage in similar acts.

There’s even evidence suggesting that the more empathetic we are, the more accurate we become at predicting the other person’s ability to engage in cooperative behavior.
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But empathy has its limits. For example, we do not have the neural capacity to recognize when we have misread verbal and emotional cues.
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Thus it is easy to think we understand what another person says and means, when in fact we don’t.

Our advice: never presume that you know what a person really feels and means. The day I, Andy, got married, the rabbi kept repeating to us, “Never assume you understand what the other person is thinking—always make sure you ask and find out.” The best way to do this is indeed to verify your assumptions with a question. For example, you might say something like “John, if I understand you correctly, I think you mean . . . Is that right?” If the other person doesn’t agree, they will appreciate the opportunity you’ve given them to communicate what they really meant.

The Social Rules of Engagement: Anger Never Works

What happens when people don’t cooperate, and how does the brain respond when somebody treats us unfairly or takes advantage of our generosity? We react with a well-documented biological process called “altruistic punishment.” In fact, it turns out that the human brain is designed to initiate punishment whenever someone violates a social contract or behaves in a way we consider to be socially irresponsible.
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But there is a problem: violators don’t appreciate being punished, and they are often unaware that they have violated the other person’s trust. If you reprimand them, they’ll feel resentful, the possibility of cooperation will deteriorate, and you’ll run the risk of retaliation.
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But if you don’t say anything, the unfair behavior continues. In fact, if your voice shows even the slightest amount of disdain or sarcasm, it will be interpreted by the other person as an act of hostility. The result: relationship dissatisfaction and instability.
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In personal relationships, punishment—whether in the form of anger, criticism, or judgment—rarely works. But the brain seems to be hardwired when it comes to disappointment. If we don’t get what we want—even if what we want is unrealistic—the brain’s anger center gets stimulated. If our desires are frustrated, and the reward we hope for is postponed, the anger center gets stimulated. If we’re in a rush and someone in front of us is driving slowly, we get irritated because our selfish desires are thwarted.

The best solution to the cycle that we know of is to interrupt the negativity by generating a thought that expresses compassion for yourself, the situation, and the other people involved. The research is robust: if we deliberately send a kind thought to the person we perceive as having violated our personal space, we psychologically increase our sense of social connectedness and strengthen the neurological circuits of empathy and cooperation.
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Researchers at the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University have found that people who use punishment the least are more likely to gain more cooperation from others, as well as to increase financial benefits for themselves. They state bluntly, “Winners don’t punish . . . while losers punish and perish.”
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Power Plays Don’t Work

According to the United Nations, cooperation, not
power
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is the key to conflict resolution. When one party tries to impose its belief systems and values on another, conflicts escalate. If a dispute is settled through coercion, both parties feel less satisfied with the outcome.
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Research at Cornell University’s Department of Neurobiology and Behavior found that there is something else you can do to improve your chances of forming stronger cooperative relationships with others, at home and at work: be more generous.
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Generosity sends a specific message to other people’s brains, telling them that you intend no harm. If a disagreement is being aired, it de-escalates the potential of an angry rebuttal and opens the door to reengage in a cooperative conversation.

In other words, being kind to those who are unkind to you will soften their hearts and soothe their angry brains. So the next time someone zooms up behind you, blasting their horn and waving their frustrated hands at you, give them the right of way. By pulling over and letting them speed by, you have shown a little bit of respect. And perhaps one day they will return the favor to someone else.

The same thing applies to conflicts at work. If you show your unkind boss a little extra compassion, your financial security will remain intact. Kindness builds cooperation, and cooperation builds a better brain.

C
HAPTER 6

The Language of Trust

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he brain is an enormous communication center. It has approximately eighty-five billion neurons and eighty-five glial cells, each with a “mind” of its own. They’re efficient and cooperative and continuously connecting and disconnecting from one another.

This is the storage bin of our accumulated knowledge, feelings, memories, beliefs, and habituated behaviors, but only a tiny bit of this vast information is accessible to our everyday consciousness—those four or five chunks of information that we can hold in our working memory for a half minute or less. Compared to the rest of our brain, conscious awareness seems highly inefficient. It has a very limited view of reality, and it compensates by filling in with a lot of assumptions and guesses.

How accurate is this model of the world consciousness constructs? We really don’t know, and so we basically have to trust that it is reliable and useful. For the most part, it does a reasonably good job, but even so, it offers us only very limited access to the reality going on in other people’s minds. When we engage in a meaningful conversation, our brains attempt to evaluate the trustworthiness of other people’s intentions and words. If we can’t establish trust, we can’t do business, and we certainly won’t fall in love.

First let’s briefly define “trust.” The dictionary gives us a range of choices: hope, faith, belief, reliance, confidence, and dependence. In relationships trust is the confidence we place in another person who we believe we can rely on in order to achieve a cooperative goal. But trust is something that cannot be measured directly. We can measure money, and to a large extent performance, but what quantity
of trust does it take to assure that a successful exchange will occur?

Since our brain does not place much trust in the words other people use, it looks for other ways to gauge trustworthiness. We try to determine a person’s character by evaluating their performance, abilities, and strengths, but the brain also gives special attention to their eyes, mouth, and, to a lesser extent, to the subtle intonations of their voice. Indeed the language of the eyes and the language of the lips are important means of stimulating the brain’s trust circuits. And because it’s easier to fake a trustworthy smile, the brain pays more attention to the involuntary movements of the muscles surrounding the eyes.

One type of gaze will attract us, while another will turn us away, and it only takes a split second for an astute observer to notice this physiological change. Thus from the perspective of neuroscience, the old axiom turns out to be true: when it comes to building trust, first impressions really count. If we see signs of happiness, our trust increases, but if we see the slightest bit of anger or fear, our trust will rapidly decrease.
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Honesty and Deceit

We need to look at a person’s face to evaluate their trustworthiness, but the moment we realize that someone is looking at us, the brain shifts into a brief state of anxiety and alertness as it decides if the person is a friend or foe. Obviously, this presents a dilemma when it comes to first impressions, because it means that we are likely to see a face that appears anxious and thus untrustworthy—at least if the person is aware that we are looking at them.

This neurological problem is a reminder that first impressions really only provide a hint about a person’s character and integrity. The same holds true when it comes to the notion of love at first sight. For example, the person you see sending you that special look of desire may, in fact, be thinking about someone or something else. You may think they’re interested in you, but they’re really enamored of the pastry displayed in the baker’s window behind you. We can use first impressions as a clue, but we need to gather far more information as we engage the other person in conversation.

What causes us so much concern when we realize that someone is gazing at us? The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called it “the look,” and he believed that the moment we realize someone is watching us, we become uncomfortably self-conscious. Neuroscience validates this premise to some extent but mostly for people who feel anxious or are behaving deceitfully. Eye contact tends to increase trustworthiness and encourage future cooperation among people engaged in positive social behavior.
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The same effect is generated when we see someone with a happy gaze.
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Sartre argued that being gazed at can cause us to feel shame. In fact, he assumed that when we are alone our social morality fades away. Here the research supports Sartre’s view. In a unique experiment designed by the Evolution and Behaviour Research Group at the University of Newcastle, researchers set up a coffee, tea, and milk station in an office. The price of each item was posted and an “honor” box was placed on the table for people to put their payments in. The researchers added one other element: a picture hung next to the price sign. For five of the experiment’s ten weeks, different pictures of flowers were posted, but on alternating weeks, photographs of different pairs of eyes were posted so that they stared directly at the person who was standing in front of the beverage station. During those weeks, three times the amount of money was collected.

Clearly there was less cheating and more generosity when the office workers subconsciously perceived that they were being monitored, not by a person but by a photograph! As the researchers explained, “The human perceptual system contains neurons that respond selectively to stimuli involving faces and eyes, and it is therefore possible that the images exerted an automatic and unconscious effect on the participants’ perception that they were being watched.”
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In response to this research, the Newcastle police department launched an anticrime initiative in which it hung posters of glaring eyes, with the byline “We’ve got our eyes on criminals.”
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The result: crime dropped 17 percent during the first year after the posters were displayed around the town. A similar experiment has been running for several years in Derbyshire, England, in which cardboard cutouts of police officers were placed around town.
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This did deter shoplifters and gas thieves but didn’t seem to deter one type of thief: many of the police cutouts were stolen!

As other laboratory experiments have shown, people increase their levels of honesty and cooperation when they think they are being observed. But when anonymity is assured, we tend to act more selfishly, with greater dishonesty and deceit.
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The Language of the Eyes

Eye contact is a central element in social cognition, and everyone—from birth to death—depends on it to help them read other people’s emotional states.
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For infants, gazing into others’ eyes is crucial for the neural development of the brain. It enhances cognition, attention, and memory, and it helps infants to regulate their emotions.
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