Your 'Oprah' brain

Many people, including myself, are always hungry for good conversation. “Talk” is something we will never be short of in supply. Talk can happen without really caring if someone is listening or understanding what is being said. But if people are truly conversing, they should be able to understand each other. Whether we like talk shows or not, I think this is why Oprah is a milestone in entertainment. Oprah figured out how to have conversations on all kinds of topic on national TV — there was always a story and there was a listener and often, even an expert to comment on the story.

On good days, we have such engaging conversations with people that we thank them and say “we think in the same wavelength.” The measure of a good conversation is understanding and understanding, in turn, depends on how well you have listened. Last month, scientists figured out a way to see what a good conversation really looks like and to do this, they looked at the brains of the ones telling a story and the brains of those listening to the story.  

The title of the study published in the July 2010 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of the US was “Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication” by Greg J. Stephens, Lauren J. Silbert and Uri Hasson of Princeton University.

They had two storytellers, taking their turn, in an fMRI machine (a machine that enables a view of your brain’s blood flow as it engages in an activity) as they recounted an unrehearsed story in their freshman year. One told it in English and the other one in Russian. They recorded these stories and then played these back to 10 listeners who only understood English while these listeners were also connected to fMRI machines. The scientists recorded these images of the brains of the storytellers and listeners. Then the listeners had to recount in writing what the story was in as much detail as they could. The scientists found that the brains of the English-speaking storyteller and the listeners were “meeting” in that if the images from both were superimposed, their active brain parts overlapped like clouds within clouds. Not surprisingly, there was hardly any literal meeting of minds between that of the Russian-speaking storyteller and the non-Russian-speaking listeners.

“Meeting of minds” here means that the brain regions that the storyteller was using in producing his story were also the same regions that the storyteller activated in the listeners. And the larger the extent of the space of this “overlap,” the better the comprehension. We can actually see what happens to our brains when we are having good conversation. Well, of course, fMRI machines are not exactly fixtures in cafés and restaurants or even in your living rooms where conversations usually occur but this job goes to scientists who have special passes to use these machines.

The scientists explained that this “meeting of minds” is happening because speakers turn out to use the brain parts for understanding when they speak and listeners also use their “telling” brain parts in order to process the auditory signals that are coming their way.

These areas include “Broca’s area,” known to house a good portion of our brain that processes speech, “Wernicke’s area” and the “temporoparietal junction” or TPJ which is a brain part that enables you to distinguish yourself from others, and other brain parts like the precuneus and medial Prefrontal Cortex which give us what I call “deep dark chocolate liqueur filling” in language which is “meaning.” Those two brain parts have to do with discerning beliefs, desires and goals in others which form the golden ticket to a successful conversation.

However, the scientists were a bit surprised that the listeners are also able to anticipate the activity in the storyteller’s brain and this had to do with the listener’s ability to anticipate upcoming words from the storyteller. Note that this is “mental anticipation” and did not include finishing the storyteller’s sentence verbally — that habit of finishing someone else’s sentence.

Genuine conversation could be so elusive and yet half of it depends on you. In this age of cheap technology that enables you to talk without interruption, who really listens? How much of our talk grow up to become the golden conversations worth the hours of our lives?

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