Words Can Change Your Brain (7 page)

These neuroscientific studies teach us how important it is to pay close attention to the nonverbal messages given to us by others and to train ourselves to communicate more fully by consciously using our facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language. If our words and gestures are incongruent, a form of neural dissonance occurs that will confuse the person who is listening and watching.
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Learn How to Speak with Your Body

Here’s a simple exercise that will give you an experiential sense of how words and gestures interact in the brain. Say the following sentence out loud and notice whatever thoughts, images, or feelings come to mind:

THE BALL IS ROUND

Now, say it again slowly, but this time cup your hands as if you are holding a large grapefruit. Notice how it changes your imagery and feelings. Once again, say aloud, “The ball is round,” but this time make a huge arc with your hands and arms. It should feel very different, and it should even affect the tone of your voice. When you consciously orchestrate your words with your gestures, you rivet the attention of the listener. Comedians are masters of this technique, and without such gestures, the humor behind their words can be lost.

If you want to become more effective at communicating with your facial gestures, Paul Ekman recommends that you stand in front of a mirror and imitate expressions of anger, sadness, and fear. Ekman found that when you make such facial gestures, “You will trigger changes in your physiology, both in your body and your brain.”
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With practice, you’ll learn how to identify these disruptive emotions in yourself, before
they can derail a conversation with someone else.

Practicing expressions relating to happiness and satisfaction turns out to be a little trickier. You can try it in the mirror, but you’ll soon discover that the slightest changes in a smile convey different meanings, ranging from anxiety to contentment. Because the expressions of emotion are often controlled by involuntary muscles, it’s much harder to fake honesty, love, and trustworthiness. And yet most people, when they do feel compassion and kindness, are not able to fully show these expressions on their face. In
chapter 5
we’ll explain how you can consciously and deliberately generate these important facial cues when you engage others in conversations requiring trust and rapport.

Each time you enter a conversation with another person, pay attention to the vast number of nonverbal expressions being made. Then try to coordinate your hand gestures, gaze, and body posture with the other person. When you mirror each other, you’ll be able to better understand each other and far more likely to like each other as well.
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We also suggest that you practice in front of the mirror prior to giving an important talk. If you’re going for a job interview, or need to present a new idea to your boss, or to address a concern to a colleague, the time you spend rehearsing what you will say and coordinating your words with your body will help assure the best possible outcome. Therapists can become more effective, public speakers more highly rated, doctors more respected by their patients, managers more respected by their employees, and teachers better able to improve their students’ work. As Spencer Kelly, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Colgate University, emphasizes, “Teachers can use gestures to become even more effective in several fundamental aspects of their profession, including communication, assessment of student knowledge, and the ability to instill a profound understanding of abstract concepts in traditionally difficult domains such as language and mathematics.”
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Don’t Be Tone Deaf When You Speak

Vocal inflection, like body language, also plays an essential part in conveying a message in a meaningful and persuasive way. As researchers at Emory University point out, the tone of your voice—the pitch, loudness, tempo, and rhythm—will often convey more useful information than the words you say.
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Even dogs can discern the difference in your tone of voice, recognizing if your command is imperative, or simply informative.
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And the same holds true for your wife and kids, and for the colleagues you interact with at work. If you don’t use the right tone of voice, you may convey the wrong meaning, and thereby be responded to in a way that you did not intend.
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Vocal modulations convey emotional context, and they are so powerful that they can actually change the way that words and meanings are embedded into memory.
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This gives us an important clue concerning effective communication. We want to make sure that people will remember what we have said, and vice versa, which means that we have to train ourselves to pay close attention to all
the elements of communication: words, tone, facial expressions, gestures, and other subtle cues.

That’s a lot of information to take in, and the best way to do it is to slow down the conversational process, speaking for briefer periods of time and listening more intently to the other person’s vocal inflections. However, if you are stressed out or in a hurry, you will likely ignore these suggestions, which is why we emphasize the importance of staying relaxed during every stage of the conversation.

What Do Words Taste Like?

Words, you may be surprised to hear, have different flavors, and speech can trigger sensations in our mouth and gut!
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High tones tend to taste sweet or sour, and low tones taste more salty.
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As one Oxford scientist put it, bitter flavors taste like a trombone.
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Studies like these show that communication is a multisensory process, and if we speak too fast, without awareness of our physical and emotional state, we may overlook cues that provide important information for solving problems and working with others.

The Brain’s Compassionate Circuits

We’re just beginning to map the social-communication circuits in the brain, but two of the newest evolutionary structures—the insula and the anterior cingulate—appear to work together when we engage in important social interactions. They are involved in the expression of compassion and empathy, in conflict resolution, and in the recognition of deception. They work in tandem to regulate our emotional reactions and behavior, they both play a major role in suppressing fear and anger generated by the amygdala, and they are also directly involved in language processing, speech, and listening.
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These structures are essential for developing the skills of self-reflection and introspection, and they have strong neural connections to other major structures in the brain.
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Many of the twelve strategies of Compassionate Communication have been shown to improve the functioning of these areas, thus increasing our ability to respond to other people with deep empathy and concern.
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In fact, the types of mental practices included in this book have been shown to increase the size, thickness, and activity in both the insula
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and the anterior cingulate.
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This suggests that the improvements in communication may become permanent if you practice Compassionate Communication regularly.

Thinking in Pictures

Before we learn to think in words, we instinctively think in pictures. As the brain continues to develop, we gain the ability to think in increasingly abstract ways. The following illustration shows how we mature from the language of pictures to the language of words:

In general, pictorial language is processed in the rear regions of the brain, while abstract concepts engage the language regions in the frontal lobe.
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To communicate effectively and have meaningful dialogue with others, we need to use a combination of words, symbols, and images.
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When Things Go Wrong in Our Brain

The neuroscience of communication is one of the most complicated fields of research because there are so many elements involved. Different parts of the brain are constantly “talking” to each other and “relating” with each other, but if one small part is damaged, our capacity to communicate effectively with others can collapse.

Let me give you several personal examples I, Andy, encountered when I was a resident in the neurology wing of a university medical center. One of the first patients I was assigned to was John. He’d had a stroke that affected the part of his brain associated with “receptive language.” When I walked into the room, he immediately struck up a conversation. He told me how well he was doing and how quickly he was recovering. He even complimented me because of the excellent care he was getting from the hospital.

“But,” he added, “the food is lousy.”

I was impressed. After all, chatty patients are often the first ones to recover from their neurological problems.

“Are you having any pain?” I asked.

“Well, the nurses are nice and really
attractive!”

This was not the answer I expected. So I asked him another question. “Do you know what hospital you are in?”

“You see that other patient in my room? He snored throughout the night and kept me awake.”

No matter what question I asked, his response was unrelated. What was happening? The areas involved in listening had been damaged, but the areas involved in speaking were just fine. He could tell me exactly what he was feeling, and he could talk to me about anything
he
wanted to talk about, but he had no ability to process what I was saying to him. Even if I gave him a simple command like “raise your arm,” he wasn’t able to respond. He wasn’t angry or frustrated with me, but I felt like I was talking to a brick wall.

The next patient I examined was Sally, a seventy-four-year-old woman who’d had a stroke near Broca’s area, the part of the brain that allows us to construct sentences and make proper use of them. I went in, introduced myself, and asked her how she was feeling. She just nodded. But when I asked her to raise her left hand, she did it right away.

“Tell me your name,” I asked.

Again all she did was nod.

“What day is it?”

Another nod.

Then I asked her to clap her hands, and she immediately put her hands together and started to clap.

This patient was unable to express herself in words. She could understand what I was saying, and carry out any action I requested, but she couldn’t access her language centers to express what she was thinking. This condition is called expressive aphasia.

On the next day, I visited Michael, a sixty-eight-year-old gentleman who also had expressive aphasia. He didn’t have any of the problems Sally had. Instead he called things by the wrong name.

I showed him my necktie and asked him what it was.

“It’s a machine gun,” he said.

Now that was surprising! I wanted to know whether he really thought it was a weapon, so I took it off and handed it to him.

“Tell me how you use it,” I asked.

He immediately took the tie, put it around his neck, and made a perfect Windsor knot. Clearly, he knew what it was, but his brain did not allow him to say the word “tie.”

I asked him why he had called it a machine gun, and he gave me the strangest look. “I couldn’t have said that! I must have been joking around with you.”

Obviously, he had some awareness of his problem, and so he used the logic centers in his brain to cover up his embarrassment.

Some people have damage to the area between the listening and speaking areas of the brain. One of my patients, named Dorothy, had this problem after suffering a stroke. If I asked her to get a glass of water, she’d go to the sink, pick up a glass, and fill it. But if I asked her
what
she wanted to drink, she couldn’t respond. Instead she’d say something like, “I don’t feel like taking a walk.”

Cases like these demonstrate how complex and fragile our language systems are. In certain forms of schizophrenia, the processing centers can become so scrambled that words come out in the most bizarre ways. And yet they seem to make perfect sense in the patient’s mind.

Every human brain, from the moment of birth, develops in unique ways, and thus no two people have the same communication style. This allows for a wide range of creativity, but it also explains why it’s easy to misunderstand one another. To make matters worse, we can only be consciously aware of a small amount of the inner communication that is constantly taking place. Research clearly shows that we all have the capacity to improve our awareness and our styles of communication, but we have to work at it every time we enter a dialogue. Consciousness demands that we stay in the present moment and not be distracted by the inner commotion of the brain and the outer commotion of the world.