82. Speakers’ Brains and Listeners’ Brains Sync Up During Communication
When you listen to someone talking, your brain starts working in sync with the speaker. Greg Stephens (2010) put participants in his research study in an fMRI machine and had them listen to recordings of people talking. He found that as people listen to someone talk, the brain patterns of both speaker and listener start to couple, or mirror each other. There’s a slight delay, which corresponds to the time it takes for the communication to occur. Several different brain areas were synced. He compared this with having people listen to someone talk in a language they did not understand. In that case, the brains do not sync up.
Syncing Plus Anticipation Equals Understanding
Get 100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
