Page 10 - Effective communication Skills by Dale King

less likely to understand what is happening or they could just stop listening

altogether.

In the 1930s, Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett performed some interesting
experiments. Through these experiments, we have learned that listeners will
“fill in” details about the things they are hearing. We also know that a
person’s memory of the speaker doesn’t distinguish between the things they
heard and what their brain told them.

In Bartlett’s studies, he had students read a folktale and then asked them to
retell the story. They would end up adding some details. For example, one

part of the story said, “That Indian has been hit,” and some of the students
would say that an Indian had been hit by an arrow, or that the Indian had been
killed. They would also change some of the other unfamiliar facts. You can
even test this on yourself. Pick a short story that you don’t know and read it.
Then, in a couple of days, record yourself retelling the story out loud. See

how the two compare.
The people involved in the story felt certain that their memories of the story

were correct. They weren’t able to tell the difference in their retelling. Why?
Bartlett came to the conclusion that the mind understands things through
“schemas.” These are mental maps that relate objects and actions to one
another. Once they are learned, the scheme works kind of like a mad lib book
or a fill in the blank test. Once a person knows that the story is about Indians

and canoes, their mind is going to “fill in” moccasins and arrows even if they
weren’t an original part of the story. The same can be true if you were to
throw in something about samurai swords; they are going to leave out that
part because it doesn’t belong.

In the MRI study, performed at Princeton University, they discovered two
neural mechanisms. The first is during communication, sound waves coming
from the speaker, couples the listener’s brain response with the brain
response of the speaker. Second, the brain has created a common neural

protocol that gives us the ability to use brain coupling to share information
with others.

They did a second study where they took people into an fMRI scanner and
scanned their brains as they were listening to or telling a real story. They
looked at the similarity of the neural responses for the listeners in their
auditory cortices, which is the area of the brain that process sounds. They