For me, one of life’s more frustrating interactions is when I’m mid sentence and somebody cuts
me off.
They jump right in and interrupt.
And if you interrupt back, you find yourself in a circle of constant interruption.
So, why do people interrupt you?
Now some reasons people interrupt are more straightforward –
Some could be overtaken by excitement, and blurt out the response they’ve already formed
a little too soon.
Other people interrupt as a power move to seem more influential and as a result, the
people who they cut off are rated as less influential.
If this happens to you, just keep talking.
But there are other reasons people interrupt that we don’t fully understand.
Yet.
The thing is, conversations are really complicated because we have to time this precise back
and forth with others.
In a normal conversation, we take one fifth of a second to reply, which is like half a
blink.
Anything shorter than that and you’re interrupting.
Any longer, and there’s an awkward pause.
So to better understand what brain magic goes into a conversation, and where it can go wrong,
researchers have turned to… mice.
Not just any rodent, but a singing mouse native to the Costa Rican cloud forest.
They perform long and complex high-speed songs that mimic the pace and back-and-forth of
human conversation.
Even though you might look at this little guy and think, he looks just like my coworker
who always interrupts me, it turns out they’re actually pros at taking turns when they sing.
They’re very polite!
Somehow, they can coordinate their back and forth conversations with split second precision.
Just like humans.
(Theoretically!)
In a new study with the mice, researchers identified an area of the brain called the
OMC that acts kinda like an orchestra conductor – it coordinates this back and forth precision
of their communication.
“So I know what it's your turn you go.
And when it's my turn, I with almost no delay can snap in”
So when researchers stimulated the OMC, the mouse flexed its vocal muscles.
And when they slowed down the areas activity by mildly cooling it, the mouse took longer
to reach the end of its song.
Then, when the area was inactivated by a drug, the mice could still sing, but they sang over
each other.
You could say they interrupted.
And now “We’re trying to find out where is it
in people where there's a kind of spark that allows for conversational exchanges to be
planned and then quickly executed in the same way as these mice”
Of course humans are more complicated, but the little mice can show how the brain generates
speech and conducts conversation.
This helps us understand how speech is affected in people suffering a stroke, or communication
differences in people with autism.
Now, remember what I said about the speed of conversations back in the human world?
Normally we reply in half the time it takes you to blink – anything shorter, you interrupt.
Longer and there’s a pause.
But these awkward pauses – even though they’re memorable – are pretty uncommon in all of
the fluid conversations that we’re having everyday.
We often have in mind our response to what the other person is saying before they even
finish speaking.
And we squeeze our responses into these tiny time frames.
So while you may find someone interrupting you rude or annoying, just take a second,
please, to consider the amazing skills that go into our everyday conversation.
Your brain is trying very hard and it’s doing a pretty good job.
It’s kind of amazing that we don’t cut each other off more frequently.