Page 11 - Effective communication Skills by Dale King

looked at the brain scans before the stories started to get a baseline reading.

At that point, the brains were all very different and not synced up.

However, once the stories began, they noticed something amazing. All of the
listeners’ neural responses started to match up. They started to move in the
same frequency to each other.

This is what scientists refer to as “neural entrainment,” which refers to the
process of the brain response to lock and align with the sounds of speech. But
what drives this brain activity; the ideas that the speaker is conveying, or the
sounds they are producing?

They continued on with their experiment. They took recorded stories and
played them backward for the listeners. This kept much of the same auditory
sounds, but it got rid of the meaning. They found that this created
entrainment or the neural responses of every listener but didn’t go any further
into the other areas of the brain. Based on this, they figured that the auditory
cortex would be entrained by sounds, regardless if there was an intelligible
meaning or not.

Then they tried scrambling the words. This made the words comprehensible,
but it sounded like a bunch of unconnected words. These words created
alignment in the early language parts of the brains, but nowhere else.

They then formed the words back into sentences. While each sentence made
individual sense, they don’t go together to create a story. When this version
was played for the listener, they start the entrainment move to every language
area that processes grammatically coherent sentences. But once they finally

played the full engaging story for them, they entrainment spread through
more of the brain and created aligned responses between all of the listeners,
which included the parietal and frontal cortices.

This led them to believe that the high-order cortical areas would become
entrained to the ideas that a person shared as they placed sentences into an
understandable narrative. If this conclusion should prove to be true, then if

they shared a story to two listeners that were the same but used different sets
of words, their brain’s response would remain similar. To test this, they took
the story they had been using and translated it into Russian.

They played English version for their English listeners, and then played the
Russian version to Russian listeners and compared the neural responses. They