Words Can Change Your Brain (9 page)

And that’s exactly what happens when we listen to another person speak. The brain takes all the words and implied meanings and summarizes them into a momentary thought. If the person who is speaking uses too much information, our unconscious processes arbitrarily choose which words seem relevant in that moment.

You can guess what the problem is. Most of us believe it’s best to give a detailed description to the person with whom we’re conversing, never realizing that they can only focus on four tiny chunks of information and for a very brief period of time.

Let’s use the previous paragraph as an example. You can say it in about ten seconds, and you can read it even faster. But I bet you wouldn’t be able to repeat it, even if you reread it a dozen times. Why? Because it contains between ten and fifteen chunks of information, which is far more data than everyday consciousness can handle. When researchers at the University of Missouri tested young and old adults, they found that even a single sentence composed of ten words was difficult to recall accurately.
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When we understand the limitations of everyday consciousness, we can use this information to become better communicators by speaking briefly and then asking the person if they understood what we said. If the concept you want to convey is new or complicated, then repeating your message in different ways will help the other person’s brain to build an inner comprehension of its essential elements.

We can also improve our communication skills by taking advantage of another neuroscientific fact: the slower
we speak, the more the listener’s comprehension will increase.
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Speaking slowly also relaxes both the speaker’s and listener’s bodies.
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The result? Less stress and greater understanding, with the least expenditure of words. It’s a win-win situation—for your body, your brain, and each other—and the formula is easy to remember:

KEEP YOUR SENTENCES SHORT

AND SPEAK SLOWLY, FOR THIRTY SECONDS OR LESS

Brevity Reduces Conflict

Sometimes even thirty seconds is too long, especially in situations where emotions run high. When Mark introduced Compassionate Communication at a meeting of the Coalition for Collaborative Divorce (a Southern California organization of collaborative attorneys, therapists, and financial advisors that helps to mediate divorces peacefully, thus keeping the couples out of the courts), he created a role-playing scenario. Two individuals acted out a hostile confrontation in which neither party was willing to compromise on a settlement issue. Different attorneys tried different strategies but to no avail, because both parties continued to argue and defend their positions. And even though they were role-playing, you could feel real tensions rising in the room.

Even limiting the dialogue to thirty seconds did not help, so we changed the rule. Everyone, including the attorney in the role play, was limited to one sentence, lasting ten seconds or less. Within five minutes, the attorney was able to move the stalemate to a point of mutual agreement. By severely limiting communication, the ability to express anger was removed. That’s the funny thing about anger. Not only does it give the person a false sense of self-righteousness, it neurologically generates more anger.

When we work within severe time limits, sometimes the most creative and utilitarian ideas pop up. When we suspend the mental chatter of everyday consciousness, other forms of cognitive processing come to the foreground. These deeper intuitive capacities involve different neural processes, and they assess a situation faster than the mechanisms that make use of the “chunking” mechanism of working memory.

Stay Relevant and Avoid Distracting Sounds

When we consciously limit our speaking to thirty seconds or less, we learn to select our words more carefully. This approach has a specific neurological advantage, because irrelevant speech disrupts patterns of neural coherence in the brain, making it difficult for the listener to understand what is really being said.
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Irrelevant speech also interferes with judgment and learning.
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Scientists at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Ohio found that when two people talk at the same time, it degrades a person’s ability to pick up important verbal cues.
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In fact, any background conversation—as when you’re sitting in a restaurant or a cubicle in a crowded office—will interfere with your brain’s ability to carry out any form of mental task.
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Even hearing traffic noise in the background is enough to impair a person’s ability to learn.
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Our advice: if the conversation is important, find the quietest place possible so that you can fully concentrate on each and every word you hear.

Becoming Conscious of Everyday Consciousness

Compassionate Communication teaches us how to become acutely aware
of the way we normally think, and the moment we turn our attention toward the mind’s inner processes, the molecular, cellular, and chemical functioning of the brain begins to change.
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In essence we create a new form of consciousness that is based on self-reflection and observation.

When we turn our awareness onto ourselves, we often make an astonishing discovery: it’s nearly impossible to stop our minds from thinking. In fact, everyday consciousness appears to involve a continual stream of inner dialogue, and we can tune into that dialogue in the same way we listen to other people. There’s even a recognized term for this ongoing neurological process. It’s called “inner speech,” and it can pose a real problem by interfering with our ability to pay attention to what other people are saying.

The Inner Voice of Consciousness

Inner speech preoccupies most of our waking life. It gives voice to our
interior
experience of the world around us,
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and as researchers at the University of Toronto have found, “the inner voice helps us to exert self-control by enhancing our ability to restrain our impulses.”
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In fact, higher frequencies of inner speech are associated with lower levels of psychological distress.
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In 1926 the famous Swiss psychologist and educator Jean Piaget noticed that many children begin to talk to themselves between the ages of three and five. For example, when a child builds a house of blocks, she might often verbalize her actions: “Now I’m going to put the red block on top of the blue block.” When she’s done, she might say, “Now everything will fall down,” as she pushes the blocks over.

Piaget called this activity “egocentric speech,” and it demonstrates how language begins to dominate our daily lives. We use inner speech to make conscious decisions and to shape our thoughts in ways that help us communicate them to others, and we use inner speech to rehearse what we are about to say.

Inner speech begins in the first few years of life, and we continue to have these internal dialogues throughout our life span.
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It appears to occur in the left hemisphere of the brain—the side where abstract language is processed—and it plays a specific role in orienting us toward other people in the world.
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Inner speech also helps us to regulate our awareness of ourselves.
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When you pay close attention to your inner speech, you’ll discover that each emotional state—anger, fear, depression, joy, contentment, etc.—has its own voice and style of communicating. If you think this sounds like having a multiple personality disorder, you’re not far from the truth, because we all have dozens of subpersonalities, and each one has a temperament of its own. Normally these inner voices blur into each other and are somewhat indistinct, but severe traumas can unglue these personalities, freeing them to act autonomously.

Although we may not always be aware of it, different inner voices are continually commenting on our behavior. Being self-critical is a perfect example: one part of us does a job and another part chimes in and whispers, “It’s not good enough. The boss is going to complain.” Nor is it unusual to find our different personalities debating. We see a piece of clothing in a store and fall in love with it, but then the voices start: “You can’t afford it!” “But I deserve it!” and so on.

Each of these inner voices has a different effect on your brain. A self-critical voice will stimulate error-detection circuits, whereas a self-reassuring voice will stimulate the neural circuits involved with compassion and empathy.
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Negative inner dialogue can be particularly destructive. For example, anorexics often experience harsh and forceful inner voices.
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It helps them to stifle their impulse to eat, but the negative inner speech continues to erode their self-confidence, so they end up starving themselves in life-threatening ways. When they learn to stop listening to these destructive voices, their eating behavior improves.

Workaholics suffer a similar fate. No matter how much they accomplish, the inner perfectionist won’t let them rest: “You need to work more! This is not enough! What will happen if you fail?” To stop this type A behavior, which is damaging to both heart and brain, the obsessive-compulsive worker has to develop a new inner language that puts a high value on nonmaterial goals like friendship and on pleasurable pursuits.

Procrastination is another form of destructive inner speech: “What if I fail? I don’t know enough to succeed. Oh heck, I can deal with these problems tomorrow.” How do you stop this kind of inner speech? By deliberately interrupting it and replacing it with repetitive statements that bolster confidence and self esteem.
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If you change your inner speech, you change your behavior, and you actually improve the functioning of your brain. The ability to control the tone of our inner dialogues is the first step toward winning the trust and respect of ourselves and others.

Observing Your Inner Speech

We all have the power to change our inner speech in ways that will improve our lives. But we must first learn how to listen with our “inner ear.” This involves a different brain system from the one that controls inner speech.
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Here’s a little exercise you can do right now that will help you to identify these inner voices and to distinguish the useful ones from the disruptive ones. Get a sheet of paper and a pencil, and find a quiet place to sit. Take a few deep breaths, then yawn and stretch for about twenty or thirty seconds. The more relaxed you are, the easier it will be for you to hear your inner speech.

Now just sit back in your chair and remain silent. Try not to think about anything. You’ll soon discover that it’s like the old parlor game where someone tells you to not think about elephants. Immediately an image of an elephant pops into your mind. Now get rid of that elephant and take another deep breath. Close your eyes and remain silent for as long as you can.

Most people quickly become aware of fragmentary thoughts drifting in and out of consciousness. When you notice these thoughts, write them down on the sheet of paper, along with any feeling or sensation you are aware of. Then let the thought float away, as if it were a cloud in the sky. This helps you to stay neutral as you observe the constant shifts in your awareness.

After you write down each thought, take a deep breath and relax, paying attention to whatever happens next. Continue to observe, note, and let go. The longer you do this, the more intense the experience becomes. Sometimes the periods of silence will increase, and other times they will decrease, to the point where it can make you feel like you’re going nuts. As we said earlier, the brain doesn’t like to change, and the inner voices certainly don’t like being ignored!

But if you sit there and observe the voices without judging them
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which is the most important part of this equation—you’ll be developing a powerful psychological tool. As eight randomized controlled studies have shown, this exercise is one of the fastest techniques for reducing stress, anxiety, irritability, and depression.
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When you learn how to master deep awareness of yourself and others, you are less likely to get caught up in destructive emotional states that can sabotage your ability to communicate effectively and compassionately with others.

Transforming Negative Inner Speech

Inner speech is not necessarily bad. It helps us to manage strong emotional reactions, and it gives us the power to modify inappropriate behavior.
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If you are feeling anxious, worried, or highly stressed, positive inner speech can help you to feel calmer.
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And positive self-talk improves the performance of people engaged in active sports.
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It’s like having an inner coach, but you have to develop it and weed out the negative advice.

Let’s say you’re up to bat at the company-sponsored baseball game. Positive inner speech can be as simple as telling yourself, “I can do it!” or it can be as complex as devising a strategy to fake out the pitcher. But let’s say you strike out. There’s a tendency for an inner voice to blame you, or someone, for your defeat. This is the speech you need to interrupt, replacing it with assurance that you can do better
the next time you go up to bat.

When inner speech turns negative—and it can happen to even the most successful people in the world
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—it will, over time, generate a plethora of problems. It can stimulate eating disorders, passivity, insomnia, agoraphobia, compulsive gambling, sexual dysfunction, low self-esteem, and depression. It can make you quit your job in a self-destructive way, and it can drive you to treating your family with disdain.