I have recently watched a TED Talk on human communication and how it works which you can find here. And I found it incredibly interesting and I encourage you to go watch it. In the talk, Uri Hasson described several experiments and outcomes of experiments in his lab.
In the first experiment, his team put people in a fMRI and told them stories while scanning their brains. Before the story begins, the brain waves of the people in the fMRI were varying and scattered as they were more than likely thinking about different times. But when the story begins, suddenly their brain waves become similar and all from a pattern. It isn’t like exact, but they are closely related.
They also saw how only when the story means something and the words form meaningful sentences, only then did the deeper and more complex, as Mr. Hasson called them higher-order, parts of their brain begin showing activity.
Another layer is added when English and Russian speakers were told the same story in their respective languages. Since the story conveyed the same meaning, again the brain waves of the listeners from both languages were similar.
Next he discussed the brain waves of the speaker or the storyteller in relation to the listener. And much to their surprise, they again showed similar complex patterns despite language production and comprehension are two very different processes.
Next, they were shown a movie and then told to tell someone who had never seen it about it. They were asked to describe a specific scene and when they did they saw that the brain waves produced when they were given a description of the scene were similar to the ones produced when they speakers saw they seen themselves. The point of this being that our brains kind of get on the same wavelength and that allows from successful communication. One variation also explored was the effect of changing a small detail. The story was that a man at a party who lost his wife was asking his friend “Did you see my wife?”. One half of the participants were told that wife was cheating on the man and the other that the man is begin overly jealous. The brain patterns of the participants corresponded with the others who were told the same detail and didn’t match those who were told a different detail.
This is how we communicate; it can be seen as transferring one’s memories and ideas to another which is really quite incredible. If I describe Uri Hasson to you, I would say he has an accent, is bald, dark skin, wearing a black polo, and black pants. You know, if you didn’t go watch the TED for your self, have a image of Mr. Hasson. I have given my memory of him from the video to you so that you may build a image of him without ever being exposed to him. Whether it is accurate or not doesn’t necessary matter.
And this is very important to society as we surround ourselves with people with similar ideas, goals, experiences. You could say people who are on the same wavelength. And how we are told different bits of information may change our view of the issue. So when on person listens to one news station regrading information of COVID-19, for example, and another is told by a different station, they might disagree if the stations told them conflicting information. The same is true when you see other aspects of society such as culture or politics; people surround themselves with people with similar ideas and tradition leading to the formation of political parties and different cultural groups. But will this can divide us, communication can even more so bring us together and it is one of the fundamental keys to the success of our species: just talking.
Autism Aid 