Page 12 - Effective communication Skills by Dale King

didn’t get similar responses, which they expected because the different

languages sounded different. However, they did find that the responses
within the higher-order areas were similar among all of them. This was
because they all had the same understanding of the story.

Now that they had this information about what happens in a listener’s brain,
they wanted to look at what happened in the speaker’s brain. The storyteller
then underwent an MRI scan and they compared what happened within his
brain to the listener’s brain. Producing and comprehending speech are two

different things. But amazingly, as mentioned earlier, the brain responses
were very similar in the two groups.

The more understood the storyteller was, the more connected their brain
waves were. This moved them onto another question. How can this coupling
help us transmit a memory from one brain to another? They tested this by
having people watch the pilot episode of Sherlock as they scanned their

brains. Then, while still being scanned, they told the episode in the form of a
story to another person.

In this episode, there is a scene where Sherlock takes a cab that is driven by
the murderer. The subjects who were watching the scene showed specific
neural patterns in the high-order brain areas. What was interesting is when
they recalled this scene and shared it in story form to a person; the same
patterns were seen in the listener’s brain. This means that these brain patterns

happen even when a person shares just a memory, not a real experience. This
shows the important role language plays in sharing memories to other people.

The act of communication, though, is very far from perfect, and in many
cases, we tend to fail to communicate in an effective manner, or are simply
misunderstood. People can interpret the same stories in different ways. They
decided to study this problem as well. They used the story “Pretty Mouth and
Green My Eyes,” by J.D. Salinger. In the story, the husband loses track of his
wife during a party. He has to call a friend and asks, “Did you see my wife?”

They took half of their listeners and told them that the wife was having an
affair and told the other half that she was loyal.

What was interesting was that this simple sentence that they told the listeners
beforehand was enough to cause their brain responses to be different. Both
groups had similar brain responses to everybody in the group, but were
different from the other group.