Words Can Change Your Brain (6 page)

Try this experiment right now. Close your eyes and see how long you can remain empty-headed before a thought or feeling intervenes. If you are new at this exercise, you might be able to sit in complete inner silence for just five or ten seconds. And even if you are a seasoned practitioner of mindfulness, you’ll rarely be able to go for more than thirty seconds before the mental chatter kicks in.

In mindfulness the purpose is not to remain silent but to become aware of the continual shifts of consciousness that are taking place, a consciousness that is primarily language driven and is filled with opinions, beliefs, conjectures, and plans, with an occasional insight or two. By learning how to passively watch all these inner voices, you’ll become aware of the other sounds your mind has filtered out.

And then—just when you think you’ve quieted your mind—a cacophony of complaints might erupt. For example, you might find yourself thinking, “This is stupid! I’ve got more important
things to do!” In mindfulness you’ll note that thought and then you allow it to float away as you bring your attention back to a state of inner silence or to your breath. But it won’t be long before another thought or feeling intrudes, like, “My back hurts!”

This inner dialogue never seems to stop, and it doesn’t have to. Your task is to simply observe, without judging it. It’s a unique form of awareness that makes your frontal lobes light up like the Fourth of July. When this happens, the brain’s ability to generate feelings of anxiety, irritability, or stress are suppressed. Thus when you learn how to stay in this state of awareness while you work, you’ll accomplish more without getting burned out. You’ll feel more satisfied with yourself and with your work, and as some of the newest research has found, you’ll even act with greater generosity toward others.
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As one corporate researcher remarked, it will improve the gross national happiness.
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This is the neuroeconomics of business psychology, and research shows that with mindful observation and alteration of the inner voices of consciousness, corporate collaboration and management improves.
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When you add optimistic thinking to this equation, you can actually add two years to your life.
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That’s what the prestigious Mayo Clinic found in a study that followed seven thousand people for more than forty years. So choose your words wisely, because they will influence your happiness, your relationships, and your personal wealth.

C
HAPTER 3

The Many Languages of the Brain

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hen I, Mark, was seven years old, my parents took me to the United Nations. I had no idea what to expect, but I was awed by the variety of languages I heard. Each sound was like a different flavor in an ice cream store.

We sat in the viewers’ gallery and were given headphones that were plugged into our chairs. How fun! I could turn the knob and a different voice would come out, in a different language. But I was confused. A man was talking on the main floor of the auditorium, but the voice coming out of the headphones was a woman’s.

I didn’t make the connection that I was listening to translators. My dad came to the rescue and pointed to a glass-enclosed room in the back of the hall. It was filled with a dozen people simultaneously talking into microphones. He explained that they were translating what the speaker was saying so that everyone else, from different parts of the world, could understand.

Mystery solved. But in hindsight I now compare that experience to the way our brain processes language. The neurons in our brain have many different ways to communicate information to one another. Some forms are chemical, others are electrical, and there may even be other dimensions of communication that take place on a subatomic level. At any given moment, dozens of neurotransmitters are communicating different types of information to different cells. We have axons communicating to dendrites, glial cells communicating through calcium waves, white matter promoting communication between different areas of gray matter, right and left hemispheres constantly communicating with each other, and there are even discrete forms of neural oscillation that may help synchronize the overall activity of the brain.

Somewhere within this cacophony of neural dialogues, a little bit of consciousness arises, and it is through this tiny window of inner perception that we communicate our feelings and thoughts to others. Even here there are dozens of language styles. There’s verbal and nonverbal language. There’s the language of emotion and the language of abstract reasoning. There’s body language and sign language. And then there are the languages of the arts: music, poetry, painting, dance, sculpture, song, etc. These too are considered to be unique language systems of the brain, and each has to be developed through education and training.
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With the help of brain-imaging technology, we are beginning to see how each of these systems works with the others. Sometimes we can even see where a single word or image might be stored. For example, researchers have been able to locate single neurons that can hold enough information to recognize an image of the Eiffel Tower, Bill Clinton, or your grandmother.
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Where Does Language Begin?

It’s fair to say that language may begin at the moment of conception, when two strands of DNA begin to interact with each other. As embryonic cells divide, they pass on their genetic language codes to other cells. Cells begin to group together into specialized communities, and they use their own systems of language to coordinate their activities. As the organism evolves and becomes more complex, even more complex systems of communication evolve, and different cellular communities take on different roles.

As in a well-designed business, some groups assume a management position, others take on the role of production, and others begin to engineer structural changes that make the organism function more efficiently. Some groups of cells become inventive, others act as regulators, and some just sit around and worry about potential threats. In essence the brain becomes a vast community of different cultures communicating in vastly different ways for the purpose of maintaining the health of the entire system. But if communication breaks down in even the slightest way—because of disease or genetic abnormalities—the survival of the entire organism can be threatened.

At the same time that the brain is orchestrating its world of inner communication, it also has to learn how to communicate effectively with other brains that have grown up in different environments. Thus the next level of training requires that we agree upon a common language that we can speak and write. New neural processes must be developed. We have to learn how to control our vocal cords and facial expressions to pronounce words with clarity, and we also have to develop sophisticated auditory skills to identify the huge variety of sounds that continually bombard our ears. These language skills take decades to develop, which is why children and young adults are so poor at communicating effectively with others.

The Evolution of Speech

Verbal speech turns out to be one of the most advanced and complicated processes of communication. First you have to have the physiology to make sounds and gestures. Gestures are controlled by the most ancient structures in the brain, which is why gesturing is a common form of communication throughout the animal kingdom.

Speech requires a more complex brain, and the structures that support it are located in the neocortex, which literally means “new brain.” This thin outermost surface covers the more ancient emotional brain, and it contains many of the executive functions associated with language acquisition, vocal control, and a variety of interpretive functions that allow us to transform sounds into meaningful expressions that can be understood by others. Without these advanced language centers, we couldn’t form a concept of ourselves, nor could we use our creativity to consciously change our lives.

Our language centers have another unique ability not found in other animal species: the neurons of the neocortex can grow axons—the communicating ends of the neuronal body—that extend all the way back into the cerebellum and other parts of the brain that control the movements of our body.
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This gives us remarkable control over our vocal cords, facial expressions, and hand movements—three core elements in our power to be prolific communicators.

Within the animal kingdom, we alone can actually
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ourselves into developing more refined movements in our fingers, our face, and our voice. According to many researchers, this coevolution of language and the brain has given us the ability to speak with great precision.
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And the more we speak and write, the more we strengthen the language connections in the brain.

Bird Brains, Human Brains, and Expressing Your Inner Ape

All living organisms communicate in one way or another. But the question remains: are humans superior to animals when it comes to communication? Yes and no. Ants, for example, have ten thousand neurons, only one-millionth of the number in a human brain, and yet they can coordinate social activity more effectively than any society in the world. As a group they’re more peaceful, and when attacked, they are far more efficient at waging war. They understand what their societal roles are, and they can be very creative when it comes to building and maintaining their communities. Compared to the communication strategies of ants, human communicational abilities pale.

Primate vocalization turns out to be quite similar to our own,
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and the same can be said of birds. They too develop sophisticated forms of vocal communication, and some species have evolved neural language networks that are surprisingly similar to areas in the human brain.
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So what makes human communication unique? It’s not just the quality of our speech but the quantity. We use tens of thousands of facial expressions, body movements, and words, and we can combine them in endless combinations that allow us to express different nuances of meaning and emotion. Even a simple alteration of the rate and rhythm of our speech can change the context of what we say and the way it will be processed in the listener’s brain.

What about men and women? Yes, there are significant neurological differences, but despite the plethora of popular books written on the subject there is little evidence to show that one sex communicates better than the other. Except when it comes to talkativeness. Can you guess which sex is more guilty? Men! They also tend to be more assertive with their speech, and women tend to use more positive relational words than men, but the differences are small.
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A Finger Can Speak a Thousand Angry Words

Words themselves do not communicate all the essential elements of what we need and want to convey to others. The expressions we make with our faces, the tone
we use when we speak, and the gestures we make with our body are also key to communicating effectively. In fact, your brain needs to integrate both the sounds and body movements of the person who is speaking to accurately perceive what is meant.
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Furthermore, gestures actually help orchestrate the brain’s language comprehension centers.
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Paul Ekman, the world’s foremost expert on human nonverbal communication, has identified more than ten thousand discrete human facial expressions,
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and it turns out that the neural networks that control language are the same ones we use for gesturing.
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Gesturing enhances our memory and comprehension skills,
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and, depending on which hand you use, your gestures may be conveying information that will influence how the listener responds. For example, when researchers at the Max Planck Institute studied the communication styles of American presidential candidates during the final debates of the 2004 and 2008 elections, they made some fascinating discoveries. In right-handed politicians, positive messages were associated with right-hand gestures, while negative messages were conveyed with gestures by the left hand. For left-handed politicians, the findings were reversed.
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A recent Stanford University study confirmed this finding: we tend to express positive ideas with our dominant hand and negative ideas with the other hand.
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But don’t try to second-guess someone by looking at their hand movements alone; there’s often a mismatch between speech and gestures, especially when a person is trying to communicate something difficult or new.
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As Ekman points out, facial expressions and body gestures only give us clues about what the person may actually be trying to convey.

Biologists who study the evolution of human speech have demonstrated that spoken language emerges from our use of hand and facial gestures, and a recent neuroimaging study showed that hand gestures and speech originate in the same language-related area of the brain.
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This overlap between words and gestures appears to be associated with a rare cluster of brain cells called “mirror neurons.”
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The neurons that fire in someone’s brain when they make a specific gesture also fire in your brain as you observe them. Many of these mirror neurons are located in the brain’s language centers, and they may be crucial for governing our ability to empathize and cooperate with others.
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