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>> A fundamental capacity that
humans have is to engage in
conversation, we create connection
and shared realities.
My name is Matt Abrahams, and
I teach at Stanford Graduate School
of Business welcome to Think Fast,
Talk Smart, The Podcast.
Today I really look forward to
speaking with Shane O'mara.
Shane is a professor of
experimental brain research at
Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland,
and the Director of the Trinity
College Institute of Neuroscience.
He has written a number of books
his latest is called Talking Heads,
the new science of
how conversation shapes our world.
Welcome, Shane,
I'm super excited to chat with you.
>> Thank you, Matt, I'm delighted
to be speaking with you.
>> All right, let's get started.
One of your earlier books is
entitled, A Brain For Business,
A Brain for Life, How Insights from
Behavioral and Brain Science Can
Change Business and
Business Practice for the Better.
If you were to pick one actionable
insight from your book that our
listeners could deploy to change
the businesses they work for for
the better, what would it be?
>> It would be a very simple and
straightforward one, it's to be
aware of the fact that we have
systematic biases in our reasoning,
these are called cognitive biases.
And one particular bias we have is
that we focus on the upside of
the decisions we've made rather
than the possible downsides.
So, a good way to think about this
is to assume that you've gone with
a course of action, assume that it
has blown up in your face and that
it has been a complete catastrophe,
and sit down and do a pre-mortem
rather than a postmortem.
And this might help you avoid
questionable decisions about
the future of your business.
>> So, I am a big advocate for
reflection after communication,
after decision making.
I love this idea of doing
a pre-mortem, imagining things
didn't go well, so it can inform
the decisions you're about to make.
That's incredibly helpful,
takes a little bit of time, but
I bet it saves a lot of time
on the back end.
>> We know there have been many,
many products that have been
launched into the market,
I can think of New Coke as a very
good example.
There was a cereal for
children here that had a particular
name that sold very well for many,
many years, and they relaunched it
with a new name and
its sales fell through the floor.
If people had sat down a head of
time and thought these are the good
reasons for going ahead, now,
what might go wrong.
That's a hard thing to do because
it's asking you to get evidence for
why your decision making has been
faulty ahead of something having
gone wrong.
But it's a really clever way of
making sure that you've tested all
the angles before you commit
yourself to a new course of action.
>> Certainly sounds very prudent,
I appreciate that advice.
I'd like to switch now to the topic
of your latest book,
it's all about conversation.
And I'm curious, how do you define
conversation, and what are the
essential ingredients needed to
pull off a successful conversation?
>> For me,
a conversation is where we create
a shared reality together, by means
of communicating with each other.
That is most commonly by the use of
spoken language, but of course,
people can communicate in numerous
other ways, by text messages,
by using sign language,
in all sorts of other ways.
But the essence is that we
are creating a shared reality where
we come to share the same states of
emotion, we come to share the same
states of memory, and
we come to think about
the future together in a new way.
>> I like that,
it's inviting and collaborating to
create a shared reality that we can
then move forward from.
Are there essential ingredients
that go into a conversation?
So, for example,
to my mind, a conversation involves
turn-taking, it involves listening,
it involves clarifying,
are there ingredients that you look
at when you look at conversations?
>> So, you can think of
conversations on multiple levels.
I think turn taking, of course,
is an essential component of
a conversation.
When I'm speaking, you're
anticipating what I'm going to say,
you're predicting when I'm going to
stop speaking and
you're going to jump in.
And you'll do that with a gap
of about a fifth of a second.
But I think there's another way of
thinking about conversation, which
goes much beyond the issue of,
are we breathing in an asynchronous
fashion?
Are you predicting what I'm saying?
Much more what we're doing is we're
blending language, memory, and
imagination together.
So what we have is this very
high level interaction between
the mentalizing system of my brain
and the mentalizing system of
your brain, where we're trying
to align our mental states to make
some sort of prediction about maybe
the present, maybe the next ten
seconds, maybe something that we're
thinking about doing next year.
And that's really, for me, the key
thing is that we think about these
brain systems for memory, for
language, for prediction,
as independent of each other.
But actually when you look at them
in their core, we humans are social
animals, we're concerned with what
the other person is thinking.
And we think about
things collaboratively,
we think about things together, and
we spend an awful lot of our time
in the present moment but
anticipating the future.
>> I love what you're saying.
I wish I would have studied
neuroscience when I was
in graduate school because this
is fascinating to me.
Is it safe to say that our brains
are wired for conversation,
that our brains are built
to look for this blending and
syncing up with other people?
>> I think it's actually where
humans are concerned possibly
one of the core functions of
our brains.
So, we have very elaborate frontal
lobes compared to other species, if
you look at the size of the frontal
lobes compared to the rest of
the brain are actually enormous.
And what you see when you
scan people, when
you look at activity in the brain,
when they're engaged in narrative,
when they're generating speech,
or when they're anticipating what
other people are doing.
And what we're actively doing is
imagining the mental
state of the other person.
And this is a capacity known as
mentalizing.
And it's core to the success that
humans have because I can guess
what you're thinking, you can come
to guess what I'm thinking, and
on that shared basis we can move
forward together in a conversation
the two of us are having.
>> Wow, so,
are there specific things that we
can do as communictaors
to facilitate this blending,
this predicting that you're about?
For example, telling stories,
using emotive language,
certain types of words, are there
things we can do that facilitate
that connection and speed it up?
>> So I'm going to give you
a slightly side angle view on this.
One of the core functions of the
human memory system is something
called mental time travel.
And this is the idea that while
we're centered here in the present,
the two of us are talking to
each other,
we can slide backwards in time,
what were you doing yesterday,
what were you doing two weeks ago.
Or we can slide forwards in time
mentally, thinking about what we're
going to do next week, what we're
going to do the week after, or
even much further out than that.
And I think a core thing that
really good speakers focus on
is getting people to de-centre from
where they are at the moment and
opening out the future to
them in new ways.
Because if you look at the content
of our thought, what you find is
about 75% of the content of our
thought is either present centered
or future oriented.
But we're only able to engage in
this kind of thinking because we
have a memory system that we can
draw on that blends seamlessly
with our language system.
And I think when you look at
the great orators, I picked on
Abraham Lincoln, just as a good
example with his four score and
however many years ago, >> [LAUGH]
>> He's calling on the past,
but he's calling on
the past in a particular way.
It's in the service of the needs of
the present and a vision for
the future.
And allowing people through
the use of evocative language
to journey backwards, to recenter
in the present, and then imagine
that the future is going to
be better than the present is.
I think something that the great
orators kind of intuit already, and
those of us who aren't so great at
oratory can take a lesson from.
>> In essence, as a communicator,
we're a guide that takes
people from the past to the present
to the future.
And I think if you listen, not just
to great historical orators, but
if you listen to executives and
good leaders,
they do something very similar.
And I love knowing that there is
an actual neuroscience logic to
what they do, in this use of time
traveling and how it ties together
the memory aspects of our brains
with the conversational aspects,
I think is fascinating.
>> One of the things that I was
fascinated by in learning,
in researching you, is that you
have some thoughts about gossip.
Gossiping is a type of conversation
that many of us are familiar with.
You make the argument that gossip
has some utility.
How is gossip helpful?
And is there ever a time where you
would actually advise people
to gossip?
>> I think gossip gets a bad rap
and it shouldn't.
We think of gossip in a malign
sense that one person is telling
stories about another person In
a way that's designed to be
injurious to them,
to do their reputation some harm.
But that's kind of a folk story
about gossip.
When you actually look at
the functions of gossip and when
you measure gossip when it occurs,
and many studies have looked at
this, what you find is most gossip,
most of the time is helpful,
it acts as a kind of an oil in
a social situation.
It allows us to interchange
information, exchange information
with each other in ways that make
us comfortable with each other.
But it goes further than that.
If you imagine yourself coming into
a new organization, let's say, for
example, you join a sports club,
you don't know anybody, but you
need to know who gets things done?
Can you depend on the scheduling
secretary for the matches that
you've signed up for?
Can you depend on the club
secretary for other matters?
You talk to the players,
you'll talk to people, people will
feed you pieces of information.
They'll say Joe does his job very,
very well, Tom does not do his job
well at all.
And you could test the truth of
that, you can see whether
the saying that viciousness or if
there's a malign intent, or if it's
just a simple statement of reality.
And the reason I emphasize this is
that when you consider how complex
our societies are, lots of the
things that we need to know about
living every day It's information
that is tacit in nature.
It's not written down, you can't
find it by doing a search on the
internet, you have to ask somebody.
And what humans have is
this fantastic facility for
focusing on what you need quickly.
And then there's a final function
that gossip has, which is, I think,
a positive one.
We all want to be thought well off
where other people are concerned.
We don't want people speaking ill
of us, so we might decide not to do
certain things.
We use the threat of gossip to
police our own behavior.
In other words, we find ourselves
conforming to the mores and norms
of the society we are in, because
we're engaging in that act of
anticipation and prediction about
what others might say about us.
Which is a really peculiar way of
thinking about gossip because it's
gossip that hasn't happened, but
it's the fear of the gossip that
might happen in the future that you
allow to police your behavior in
the present.
>> It's fascinating to me the
various ways in which gossip can be
used, especially strategically.
I remember a boss I had at one
point and her advice to me
before we had a big restructuring
coming in the organization,
was to let some indication that
that was coming to some
of the people we knew in our team
who did gossip more than others.
In other words, we were using it as
a way of setting expectations so
people weren't surprised,
they would have heard it before so
that they could mentally prepare
themselves.
So, gossip serves a lot of utility,
and I think it's a tool that we
should all consider,
obviously carefully,
in our strategic communication.
Now, I have a very personal
question for you.
You wrote a book on
the neuroscience of interrogation.
I have two teenagers who often
accuse me of interrogating them
when I ask them what's going on.
I personally think my questions
are rather reasonable.
What advice would you give people
on how to appropriately yet
effectively get information from
people who might not be open to
sharing it?
>> So that's a great question.
I have a teenager myself and
the mood varies from day-to-day,
and the amount of information that
is offered varies from day-to-day.
I think, to speak about teenagers
for a moment, teenagers, of course,
are focused on developing relations
with their peers.
And parents are there in a support
rather than leading capacity,
which was a big adjustment from
just a few years ago when they were
maybe aged eight or nine or
ten when they look to you for
everything and
you are a source of authority.
So that becomes a kind of
a difficult change for
the parents to negotiate.
The remarkable thing here is that
people are very willing most
of the time to share information
about themselves and
what they've been doing depending
on how they are asked.
And a whole variety of data now
show that if you're able to
establish a condition of rapport
with another individual,
that is you engage in active,
respectful listening.
If you approach the person,
not from a position of kind of
attempting to dominate
the conversation,
but one where there's an obvious
attempt to engage in a respectful,
mutual interchange of information,
those kinds of conversations open
up very well.
But there's one point I would make,
very often a mistake, and you see
this very commonly when politicians
are engaged in questioning in,
I don't know,
congressional hearings or
parliamentary hearings or whatever.
They give a very
long opening statement,
followed by a very short question,
followed by something else.
If you want to elicit information,
small, short, focused questions
that are detail oriented, are very
difficult to evade, but you have to
suppress your own tendency to want
to augment the question.
So if you ask a question in
a respectful way, that's targeted
at a particular detail, and
you've got a followup that follows
on logically from that, that's
a very reasonable way to proceed.
And what you find is people will
open up,
not everybody all of the time, but
most people most of the time.
>> That last point you made,
I took notes on and
it reinforces something my wife is
constantly telling me,
minimal words, she says.
When I'm talking to my teens,
I tend to wax poetic,
share a lot of information,
and you've just supported her point
of view, minimal words, keep it
focused on something specific.
>> Your wife is very wise.
>> [LAUGH] I've said that for
a long, long time.
Before we end Shane,
I'd like to ask you some questions,
one, I'm making up in the moment,
and two, that I've asked lots of
other people.
Are you willing to do that?
>> I would love to.
>> Excellent, yet another book that
you wrote was on walking in nature.
I'm curious, just very quickly,
I love to walk myself, what are the
psychological benefits of walking?
>> So, the argument I make in that
book is that humans
are social walkers.
And I think the great benefits
of walking are found when we
walk together, and we
actually talk while we're walking.
And the core message that I have
there is that, if you want to get
psychological benefits from a walk,
do it with another person and
talk to another person.
You'll feel connected,
you'll feel more open to experience
in the outside world, you'll find
your stress hormones drop.
There are all sorts of subtle and
not so subtle benefits from
engaging in walking with another
person.
>> We have a term for that here at
Stanford's Business School,
we call it twalking,
talking and walking together.
>> What a great word,
I must use that, [LAUGH].
>> Many of us go on twalks, and
some of my colleagues are quite
fast twalkers, they talk fast and
they walk fast and I'm often out of
breath as I chase them.
Question number two, who is
a communicator that you admire,
and why?
>> So the person I admire is
George Orwell, who is sadly long
dead, but Orwell was as clear
a writer in the English
language as I think I've ever read.
His writing is not adorned prose,
it's very unadorned, but it's very
simple, it's very straightforward,
and you know exactly what he's
trying to say.
And one of the key themes that
Orwell brings up time and time
again is that the use of language
can be a political act, and
that politicians very, very often
use language to hide or obscure
truths from us that we really ought
to be paying attention to.
And he sought in his writings to be
very, very clear and
scrupulous in the kind of writing
that he engaged in.
And I've always admired his writing
style as a really good form of
clear communication for
that reason.
>> I have admired Orwell's writing
as well and I used to teach a
number of his books to get at those
points that you just alluded to.
So, our final question,
what are the first
three ingredients that go into
a successful communication recipe?
>> There's an old joke about
Tony Blair, the former
United Kingdom Prime Minister,
who was asked what his first three
priorities in power were.
And he would reply, education,
education, education.
So I would say listening,
listening, listening.
>> The more that I do this podcast
the more that I talk to experts
like yourself,
the more listening comes up,
it's very, very important.
And I have to say, Shane, it was
a true delight to listen to you.
I learned a lot in our
conversation.
I find it fascinating, the blending
of our memory systems and
our communication systems to bring
about rich exchange and
shared realities.
Thank you for your time.
>> Thank you, Matt,
I appreciate it.
>> Thanks for joining us for
another episode of Think Fast, Talk
Smart, The Podcast from Stanford
Graduate School of Business.
This episode was produced by
Jenny Luna, Ryan Campos, and me,
Matt Abrahams.
Our music was provided
by Floyd Wonder.
For more information and episodes,
find us on YouTube or
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Thank you, and
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