Can You Hear Me? The Psychology of Effective Listening
April 14, 2023
Author: Zoe Sinkford
Editor: Alex Vena
This semester, in an Abnormal Child Psychology class lecture we discussed various forms of mental health treatment and watched part of a documentary entitled Welcome to Happy Valley, the story of a small town in Washington state where a clinical psychologist diagnosed all of his patients with Depression and treated every single one of them with Prozac. I have grown up in an age where reliance on drugs and various medications as treatment for mental health disorders is increasing in popularity. I have had countless conversations with friends and learned about numerous case studies that demonstrate the dangers of using medication as a first approach to healing. I began thinking about how I would potentially change this system, and circled all the way back to the origins of psychological treatment and therapy. One of the oldest forms of psychological therapy is known as Freud’s “talking cure,” where he essentially sat down and had in-depth conversations with his patients about their current troubles and their childhoods. He realized the power and catharsis of effective conversations, something that continues to be remembered and practiced today.
Effective communication relies on the phenomenon of speaker-listener neural coupling. Neural coupling is when the brain activity of two or more individuals begins to synchronize; as one person begins to tell a story, the listener’s brain begins to fire in a way that mirrors that of the speaker. One study used an fMRI machine to visualize this process by recording the brain activity of two people engaged in verbal communication. This fMRI study demonstrated that the listener’s brain activity, both spatially and temporally, matches the speaker’s brain activity with a slight delay. This means that the listener’s brain activity mirrors that of the speaker, with a slight delay, while engaged in a conversation (Hasson et al., 2012). Neural coupling is so effective that, once the speaker and listeners brains have coupled, their two brains effectively sync, and begin to exist and work together harmoniously.
Neural coupling also predicts the success of a conversation, and I would argue that this is particularly true for transformational conversations. Transformational conversations are those that involve sharing and discovering new information. These conversations consist of sharing wisdom, asking questions to which we have no answers, and listening to the other people involved (Glasser, 2019). As we become more invested in the sharing and acceptance of wisdom, insights, and ideas of a conversation, we slowly begin to anticipate the responses we will hear, as we are consciously piecing together the information we have ‘discovered’ and attempting to make sense of it. The greater the anticipatory speaker–listener coupling, the greater the understanding (Stephens et al., 2010). Anticipatory speaker-listener coupling occurs when the listener begins to subconsciously predict the tone, implications, and energy of the speaker, allowing their brain to predict how the story of the speaker will unfold and consequently how to take in that information. It has been found that when the listener’s brain activity slightly precedes that of the speaker, there is a stronger behavioral response than when the speaker’s brain activity precedes the listener’s, alluding to the importance of prediction in effective communication. As the brain coupling becomes more synchronized, the level of comprehension on behalf of the listener also increases. Interestingly, one of the first brain regions that exhibits the impact of speaker-listener neural coupling is also implicated in the mirror neuron system: the inferior frontal gyrus, also known as Broca’s Area (Stephens et al., 2010). Broca’s area is responsible for language production, typically working in tandem with Wernicke’s area, which is responsible for language comprehension.
I find it particularly remarkable that the same areas responsible for empathy are related to language comprehension, and believe that this explains why being the ‘advice friend’, the one who friends typically go to for help, can be physically exhausting. This process of consistently taking on other people’s issues and trauma is so tiring because, through neural coupling and the mirror neurons involved, we actually experience other people's trauma in our brains. It can be very difficult to separate someone else’s emotional experience from our own, particularly if that other person is a loved one. Our friends’ emotions can essentially leak into our own experience, causing us to feel what they are feeling and connect on a more intimate level. One way to encourage these kinds of conversations and mitigate an emotionally charged discussion, is to take on a discovery mindset as the listener. It is very common for listeners to maintain an “I am always right” mentality, which can actually inhibit one’s ability to comprehend and take information away from a conversation. When someone has an “I am always right” attitude, they tend to ask questions they already know the answers to in an effort to steer the conversation in a direction that they are more comfortable with. However, being curious and asking questions that we do not already have the answers to helps to keep us engaged as well as allows us to digest new information and opinions in a healthy way (Balboa, 2020).
Speaker-listener neural coupling is so fascinating because it scientifically explains the harmony that is felt during a speech, reading, or impactful conversation. When we are truly engaged in what someone else is saying, there is a unique feeling of unity. One of my earliest experiences of neural coupling happened when I was around eight or nine years old. I was giggling and whispering secrets to my cousin, hidden under the bedsheets of the twin bed we decided to share together at my granny’s old beach house. As we dimmed the lights and snuck under the blankets, exhausted from a day spent fighting the waves and being buried in the sand, we seemed to slip into our own universe. I barely remember the actual stories we shared now, but I can still feel that harmonious sense of synchrony. No one else could hear the stories we shared or the jokes we made inside of our tent of sheets, and it seemed like I could actually feel her experiences with her because of how engaged and focused I was on what she wanted to share with me. At the time, of course, I did not realize that the experience may be an example of the influence of speaker-listener neural coupling, but I find that memory to be a particularly powerful way of summarizing the phenomenon of neural coupling as a full mind-body experience.
Sources:
Balboa, Nicklas. “Three Habits That Reduce Conversational Success.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 14 Sept. 2020, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-neuroscience-conversations/202009/three-habits-reduce-conversational-success . Accessed 8 March 2023
Glasser, Judith E. “The Neuroscience of Conversations.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 16 May 2019, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/conversational-intelligence/201905/the-neuroscience-conversations . Accessed 8 March 2023
Hasson, Uri, et al. “Brain-to-Brain Coupling: A Mechanism for Creating and Sharing a Social World.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Feb. 2012, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3269540/ . Accessed 8 March 2023
Stephens, Greg J, et al. “Speaker Listener Neural Coupling Underlies Successful Communication - PNAS.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 18 June 2010, https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1008662107 . Accessed 8 March 2023
Image: Julia Bonanno
