Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris The Science of Talking: Boost Your Mood, Sharpen Your Mind, and Protect Against Dementia | Maryellen MacDonald About this episode The way you talk to other people (and yourself) can reduce dysregulation and distraction--and lead to better decisions.
Maryellen MacDonald https://www.maryellenmacdonald.com/ is the Donald P. Hayes Professor (emerit) of Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Wisconsin−Madison. She is a cognitive scientist with a focus on psycholinguistics, the study of how we comprehend, produce, and learn languages. Her latest book is More Than Words: How Talking Sharpens the Mind and Shapes Our World https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/724046/more-than-words-by-maryellen-macdonald-phd/.
In this episode we talk about:
The hidden benefits of talking, including self-talk and writing How talking helps focus attention and clarify your thinking Why talking can help regulate emotions and improve decision-making Why talking is actually harder than listening Why we shouldn't rush to finish other people's sentences How deliberate talking can help protect against dementia Why understanding something doesn't necessarily mean you've learned it How talking about new information helps your brain remember it Why explaining things to other people deepens your own learning Why kids need chances to talk and not just watch screens Why you shouldn't judge people by how they talk Related Episodes:
The Science Of Journaling: How Writing Reduces Overthinking, Rumination, And Anxiety | Dr. James Pennebaker (Co-Interviewed By Dr. Bianca Harris) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-science-of-journaling-how-writing/id1087147821?i=1000677296672
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Dan Harris? This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:18 Dan Harris? Hello, everybody. How we doing? Today, I'm talking to a cognitive scientist about how to harness something we all do every day: talking. We're going to cover how to use talking in order to prevent distraction, depression, dysregulation, dementia, and much more. Just to be clear from the jump here, and I already made a nod to this, but I want to make it super clear. My guest is defining talking in a broad way, not just having conversations with other people, but also having conversations with yourself. In other words, self-talk, and also writing to yourself, which is another kind of self-talk. So again, she's defining talking broadly. The she in question is Mary Ellen McDonald.
0:59 Dan Harris? She is the Donald P. Hayes Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She's a cognitive scientist with a focus on psycholinguistics, which is the study of how we comprehend, produce, and learn languages. She's also written a book, which is called More Than Words. In this conversation, we talk about the hidden benefits of talking, including, as I mentioned earlier, both self-talk and writing; how talking helps focus attention and clarify your thinking; why talking can help regulate your emotions and improve your decision-making; why talking is actually harder than listening; why we shouldn't rush to finish other people's sentences; how deliberate talking can protect against dementia; why understanding something
1:40 Dan Harris? doesn't necessarily mean you've learned it; how talking about new information helps your brain remember it; why explaining things to other people deepens your own learning; and much more. Two things to say before we dive in. First, don't forget to check out my new-ish meditation app, 10% with Dan Harris. We've got a growing body of guided meditations from teachers like Joseph Goldstein, 7A Selassie, and Jeff Warren. We also do these live video sessions every week where we meditate together and take your questions, and it's the place to get this podcast ad-free. Second thing to say is, if you want to meditate with me in person, I've got two IRL events coming up. The first is on May 17th. I'll be at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. I'll guide a meditation and then take your questions.
2:24 Dan Harris? Specifically, I'll focus on how meditation can be really helpful and not self-indulgent in these fraught times. And then on October 16th through the 18th, I'll be doing a weekend event at the Omega Institute in upstate New York. It's our annual meditation party event. I do it with 7A Selassie and Jeff Warren, my two close friends. It's a full weekend. We teach a variety of meditation techniques over the weekend. We take your questions. We even throw a dance party. It's a great way to deepen your practice and to get to know other people who also meditate, which is a key part of the practice. And I will put links for both of these events in the show notes. Okay, we'll get started with Mary Ellen McDonald right after this.
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4:04 Dan Harris? Mary Ellen McDonald, welcome to the show.
4:06 Speaker 03 Thanks. It's great to be here.
4:08 Dan Harris? Great to have you here.
4:10 Dan Harris? So let me ask you, just to start here, to describe your basic thesis.
4:16 Speaker 03 Sure. So in my book, I talk about the hidden side of talking. So for talking, I'm referring to speaking, what we're doing now, writing, which is also a form of talking, signing in a sign language, and even talking to ourselves in our head. And we think about talking as being, of course, for communication, and that's not wrong. But unbeknownst to lots of people, there are these hidden sides of talking that are extremely beneficial for us, for the talker who's ever doing the talking. Talking focuses our attention.
4:59 Speaker 03 It helps us learn better. It helps regulate our emotions. It helps bring clarity to our thoughts, especially in times of emotional turmoil. It helps kids get ready for school and thinking and being alert and ready to plan and all of that. And it protects us from dementia. So all of those things are kind of separate from us talking to each other and sharing information. And I wanted to convey that in my book.
5:35 Dan Harris? So there's this thing that all of us are doing every day, talking, whether it's self-talk, talking to other people, writing, signing. We're all doing this thing that has hidden benefits if used in a more deliberate and thoughtful way.
5:56 Speaker 03 Right, especially if used in a more deliberate and thoughtful way. But those benefits can come from everyday talking as well.
6:06 Dan Harris? So we're getting the benefits anyway, but we can maximize them by taking a few strategic steps.
6:14 Speaker 03 That's right.
6:15 Dan Harris? Why is talking harder than listening or understanding?
6:19 Speaker 03 Talking is harder than listening because it's a kind of action. So here's an extreme example. It's much easier to watch somebody run a marathon than actually run a marathon. That's sort of obvious. But talking is a bunch of actions too. The muscle movements are pretty small, but in order to do what I'm doing right now, I have to make an internal plan of what I'm going to say. So for example, if I wanted to say at my restaurant or something and I want to say, "I'll have the special with fries and a lemonade."
7:00 Speaker 03 That's a really simple sentence, but in order to say that sentence, I have to get all of those words out of my long-term memory. So special fries, lemonade, I'll have, all that stuff. And I have to get those 10 words, whatever it was, out of 50 to 100,000 words that I have in my memory. And only those 10 words. If you pull up all sorts of other words, you'll gum the whole thing up. So there's this very intense focusing activity that talking requires to pull what we want
7:39 Speaker 03 out of memory, to convert the desire for the special and lemonade to actual words. And this conversion process is quite complex and effortful, and that's what makes talking harder than listening.
7:58 Dan Harris? The book is filled with practical ways that we can sort of maximize this thing that, again, we are all doing every day to get all of the advertised benefits, including dementia protection and better emotion regulation and decision making, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things you recommend, and we're going to dive into many, many of the things you recommend, but one of the things you recommend, and this just seems like interpersonal hygiene, is not to finish other people's sentences compulsively. You know, there are some people who, when I listen to them talk, it's annoying because they take a long time to fucking spit it out and I want to, you know, smack them on the head or-
8:41 Speaker 03 Finish it.
8:42 Dan Harris? Yeah, finish it for them. But you're saying, actually, you're kind of denying other people the benefits that we can get from talking if you take away their right to talk.
8:54 Speaker 03 Right, right. So really, it's pretty rude. I think in every culture that I know of, to finish people's sentences relentlessly, occasionally it's fine to help somebody out, but our ability as listeners to finish other people's sentences really reflects the greater difficulty of talking and the slowness of talking compared to listening. So there are probably listeners of this podcast who have speeded up the podcast, no offense to you or to me, but we're talking more slowly than they can listen and they've got it cranked up to better accommodate their own faster listening abilities.
9:35 Dan Harris? Yeah, I get that and I don't think that's rude at all. But what is rude is, again, I think this conversation and preparing for this conversation has sensitized me to this, that when I'm feeling the urge to finish somebody else's sentence, it's because I'm sitting in the privilege of being in the easier spot.
9:55 Speaker 03 Right. And you can try to stifle yourself, everybody, if you get in that spot and it's probably the polite thing to do, yeah.
10:04 Dan Harris? Okay, so let's get into some of the practical strategies for harnessing this everyday activity to our own benefit. You have a whole chapter about the power of self-talk and how to use talking to yourself to help with everyday tasks.
10:19 Speaker 03 Yes. The people who know the most about harnessing self-talk, I think, are athletes because they are in high-power situations and athletic victory means money and they have coaches and a whole infrastructure designed to help them get everything out of their athletic performance. And a lot of that is coaching them on self-talk. That kind of coaching is sometimes about emotion regulation, it's sometimes about strategy, helping them remember what they're supposed to be doing on the court or in the race and so on. And the rest of
10:59 Speaker 03 us can similarly gain benefits from self-talk, but we don't know about it so much. Let's imagine somebody who has to finish something. It might be a race, but it also might be a report or something for their work. And talking about the fact that they have to finish and talking about their strategy for getting it done will increase the chances that they actually do get it done. They say, "Oh, I've got to finish this report by this afternoon and it's this middle section that's really bugging me and I think I need to get my colleague to look at it or some other strategy." Having done that, having retrieved
11:44 Speaker 03 the words, finished the report and colleague and all of that stuff, you've focused your attention on the job that you have to do. And studies show that you will be more likely to follow through on it, more likely to pay attention to it, more likely to focus on the parts that you've mentioned and so on. There's limits. Like, I can't say, "I want to be an astronaut," but that won't focus my attention to being an astronaut and make me an astronaut. But the talking nudges you down the road in reasonable but significant ways. It won't take something out of nothing like making me an astronaut, but it does a lot.
12:29 Dan Harris? Do to-do lists count in this regard?
12:32 Speaker 03 I think so, yeah. Writing is a form of talking and to-do lists are very helpful. They are obviously an external reminder and that's a very useful thing when you come back to them two days later, but they're also focusing your attention on your goals. So, many people, certainly included Bee, writes a short grocery list down before going to the grocery for the things that are a little unusual. And I've left that list at home, I don't know how many times, but the act of having written down that I needed these three unusual things makes it much more likely that I will actually remember those things,
13:15 Speaker 03 even though it turns out the list isn't there for me. So, the act of creating the list is a great first step to focusing attention.
13:25 Dan Harris? Staying with this idea of using self-talk with tasks, I believe you recommend that even when you're looking for your keys, for example, to talk about looking for the keys internally or even to say it out loud if you're not embarrassed that other people are watching you can help?
13:42 Speaker 03 Yes. So, studies show that when you are looking for something, some of the studies are people looking for products on the grocery store shelves, looking for something like keys or products, saying the thing is actually helpful. And why would it work? Because you're saying the word keys, that helps you bring up the mental picture of your own keys, not some random generic key, but what your keys look like. And having a target visual idea of what you are searching for actually will help you, on average, find them faster.
14:20 Speaker 03 Whether it is gonna be life-changing, finding your keys in 43 seconds versus a minute and a half, well, it's still a real difference.
14:32 Dan Harris? Yeah, it depends how late you are.
14:34 Speaker 03 Right, exactly.
14:35 Dan Harris? I would imagine, well, we're using a simple example of looking for your car keys, but it's scalable into more complex situations.
14:44 Speaker 03 That's right. So, anything that you need to focus on, it could be something you're looking for, like the simple example of the car keys. It could be something that you are planning to do, like the report. And it also could be something long-term that you're planning. So, you aim to go to college and you aim to have this major and you aim to have this job afterwards. There are these amazing studies that ask people who have chosen a path already, and one I'll tell you about are students who were majoring in STEM,
15:28 Speaker 03 so medical, chemical engineering, biology, all of those that group, science, medicine, technology, engineering. And in those experiments, people asked students in their freshman year, in their freshman chemistry class, half of them were asked to write about some of the chemistry topics that they were having in the class. And the other half were asked to reflect about their choice to be a STEM major and why it is that they have chosen it
16:07 Speaker 03 and how this particular chemistry class and the major are going to affect their lives. And so, the act of writing all this down, the form of talking, is an act of reflection about their choices. And studies show that the people who were reflecting in three essays in freshman chemistry, two and a half years later, when they were juniors, had stuck with the major significantly more than the people who had just written about the chemistry topic. And so, the act of talking about a goal and reflecting on it
16:49 Speaker 03 has real benefits for long-term planning and long-term perseverance. And that's much bigger effect than finding your keys, although if you need to get your keys to get to chemistry class, then that's another thing.
17:04 Dan Harris? Right. Everything's connected. So two things are coming to mind as I'm listening to you talk. One is that very frequently guests on this show will talk about the overweening importance of identifying and articulating to yourself, and sometimes when useful to others, your values as a North Star and as a bone level, cellular level reminder of what matters to you. Along those lines, I think, and I initially kind of rejected, as is my want, this whole body of work because it struck me as cheesy, but intention setting, you know, just every day, you know, for example, I remind myself, you know, what's my job on the planet?
17:47 Dan Harris? As a way of articulating to myself, this is what I'm all about. Those two things are coming to mind as I'm listening to you talk about the essays that people wrote at the beginning of those engineering classes. Does it feel to you that I'm making an appropriate connection here?
18:01 Speaker 03 I think so. So the students who were asked to talk about how their major was going to fit into their life goals, didn't absolutely have to say what their life values were, but many of them would have done so. They say things like, I want to help the community, I'm a minority, and there's not enough doctors in my community, and I want to help my community. And those are absolutely ways of expressing values. And similarly, there's all sorts of research about people keeping a journal, which doesn't necessarily have to, but often can have these qualities of expressing their values.
18:46 Speaker 03 People write in their journal about some conflict at work today, and they could very much say how the conflict was affected by their values, and they didn't share the values of their coworker. And so there are definitely ways to deliberately express your values every day and think about those. And then there are these other kinds of talking environments like journaling, which probably very naturally include expressing values and attitudes that are also ways to be really beneficial.
19:23 Dan Harris? I think it's possible, and we'll see if you agree, that there's more to say about the value of journaling as a form of talking, as a form of self-talk, really, journaling, and it's sometimes called expressive writing. Yeah, so what more should we say about that?
19:37 Speaker 03 So, journaling, and particularly Jamie Pennebaker's expressive writing, because he had this variant of journaling that was writing about something emotionally bothersome, shall we say, and writing about the event and the emotions that were evoked, and thinking forward and thinking backward, and doing that not necessarily forever, as journaling could in principle be forever, but doing it for a number of days in a row for 20, 30 minutes a day. And it is a form of journaling, it's just sort of more compressed with a
20:17 Speaker 03 particular set of instructions to focus on the emotional resonance of whatever incident is bothering the person. Journaling in general, and the expressive writing variant of it, have been studied enormously, and journaling is, and expressive writing, is associated with better physical health, mental health, calm, and acceptance.
20:44 Dan Harris? A note to listeners, I've had Jamie Pennebaker, who's kind of the godfather of expressive writing, on the show, and I'll drop a link in the show notes, but you just listed a bunch of the benefits from expressive writing, which, again, is a variant of journaling. Why? What's the explanation for these positive effects?
21:03 Speaker 03 I think the positive effects are having to do with reflection, and bringing to mind something in the past that is useful, and having the space to talk about it. Joan Didion, who wrote, I don't know whether she kept a journal, but she wrote essays, enormous numbers of essays, and she says, "I write entirely to figure out what I'm thinking." And the journaling, even if you don't publish it like Joan Didion... Has that effect. It turns kind of amorphous ideas, often swirling around with emotion,
21:45 Speaker 03 into more concrete, reasoned ideas about what it is you're doing in this world and how you're relating to other people. So let me just expand on that a little bit. There's a lot of evidence that talking about something makes it more discreet and able to be accessed by your conscious mind. So if you, for example, witness a crime and the police interview you and you talk about the, what you thought is the perpetrator of the crime, you've got an image of him or her in your head and then you say something.
22:28 Speaker 03 Round face, dark hair, so tall, a few other things. Mentioning certain features of your visual memory makes those features very clear and memorable to you. And that's the sort of thing that I think is happening in journaling. You've got swirling emotions. You've got feelings that you're not quite sure what you think. And the act of writing it down makes those ideas more discreet and more clear and more able to be thought about later. Coming back to your previous entry and writing some more about it.
23:10 Speaker 03 That's letting you process, if you like, but more than process the things you're writing about, you're making them clearer and more accessible to your mind.
23:23 Dan Harris? Yeah, and I think when you move out of a kind of vague or meismatic sense of dread, fear, sadness, and you're unburdening yourself and making your thoughts about the subject much clearer and therefore more manageable and workable, it's a healing and helpful process. Along those lines, you also, in your book, mention that another aspect of self-talk that can be very helpful is to get more detailed and accurate and granular in terms of describing our difficult emotions.
23:58 Speaker 03 That's right. So lots of people can say, "Oh, I'm so upset." But they don't necessarily know what upset means. It might mean afraid, angry, disappointed, worried, and many more specific things. And in fact, we don't often talk about our emotions, our own emotions, very much. It's a funny thing. We often say, "Oh, I just got off the phone with my brother and I'm so mad at him." So you've said a little bit about anger there. But often, we let the emotional tone of our voice,
24:41 Speaker 03 the pitch and the intonation, convey some emotional information rather than actually naming the emotions we feel, like worry or anger. And so it takes a bit of work sometimes to get beyond this kind of amorphous upset situation to being, "I'm actually scared and worried and also angry." But when they are encouraged to dig and figure out exactly what upset is meaning here, they are able to obviously clarify their thinking because it's become now concrete that they are not just upset, but actually angry and worried.
25:22 Speaker 03 But also, naming emotions quiets activity in the limbic system in our brain, which is relevant to the flight or fight aspects of regulating emotions. And by quieting the limbic system, we're able to think about the situation more rationally and not have overwhelming, fly-off-the-handle kind of reactions.
25:50 Dan Harris? What you just said to me, it takes me right back to this point that talking about our shit makes us feel better about the shit. And even if it's talking to ourselves about it, but it can be particularly helpful to process in front of somebody else who can hear you out and ask clarifying questions. Which brings me to this question, which is, some people really resist talking about their stuff. I think historically, I've been that type of person. My wife asks me, how are you doing? Fine. You know, or grunts some sort of non-answer. I have an 11-year-old son. It is often very difficult to get him to talk about his stuff. What do you recommend? And maybe you don't have any recommendations. Maybe this is just one of life's vexations that there's nothing we can do about. But
26:32 Dan Harris? what possibly could you recommend to help us help other people who seem resistant to talking about their stuff?
26:42 Speaker 03 So it's tough to force an 11-year-old to talk about themselves, or even a, you know, 41-year-old. Sometimes people who won't talk to other people about their emotional situations will be talked into doing some form of journaling. Maybe not. If they don't want to write stuff down, they could possibly record things on their phone, just for themselves. They could talk in their head. They could type it on their phone or on their computer. There's a lot of ways to talk to yourself. In fact, a lot of therapists encourage people to journal, not because the therapist is going to read the journal, but because the
27:22 Speaker 03 act of journaling itself is an act of reflection that turns out to help people more. It's hard to get a truculent person to change their habits, but that's one route, possibly. Other routes, you can maybe be persistent. I think you're right. It's a tricky thing for somebody who has very deep-seated habits of not talking about how they're feeling. Trying to get them to do something that is against all their habits. It's possible that, since we've talked about it, expressive writing is a root to it because it's not a lifetime experience.
28:03 Speaker 03 Expressive writing is often asking somebody to do 20 minutes a day for three days. And somebody who can't get past the idea of writing in a journal every single day could possibly get to the point of maybe writing about one thing. Yeah.
28:26 Dan Harris? Coming up, Mary Ellen McDonald talks about why understanding something doesn't necessarily mean you've learned it, how talking about new information can actually help your brain remember it, and why explaining things to other people deepens your own learning.
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29:47 Dan Harris? Okay, so moving on, there's this whole chapter on how we can use talking to learn better. And this is of course, not just for students, this is for all of us. We all need to learn in order to continue to grow and improve and excel and perform at our best. You start by talking about a myth that you call the understanding equals learning myth. Can you talk about what that is?
30:12 Speaker 03 Yeah, so you're listening to a documentary, or you're a student in class, and you hear something that seems pretty interesting to you, and you are aware that you understood it. And people typically believe that if they've understood it, they've learned it. That's the myth. It's a myth because your conscious feeling about understanding is not the same thing as learning. Learning happens usually overnight when memories from
30:52 Speaker 03 events and facts and whatever of the day are laid down in our permanent long-term memory by this piece of the brain called the hippocampus. And hippocampus never tells us what it's doing. It obviously doesn't record every experience of every millisecond of our days. It selectively encodes things that we have engaged with or seem important to us. And the fact that we've heard something and understood it, and maybe thought it was pretty interesting, doesn't guarantee that we'll have learned it. What does help us
31:35 Speaker 03 learn is engaging with it more. And the best way to engage with it is to talk about it to yourself some more, or ideally with somebody else, because if it's an interesting thing, you probably want to tell them about it. So by talking about it, you've engaged with it, and you've increased the chance that the hippocampus is going to consider this to be important stuff and have you learn it. But the immediate understanding part, if you never interact with it again, is probably going to be gone.
32:08 Dan Harris? I was at a event recently where I spoke very briefly and I said something about Buddhism. And it said, one of my friends was at the event said, well, how do you know so much about Buddhism? And I didn't want to say, well, I've been hosting this fucking podcast for 10 years. But it's not just that I've hosted this podcast. It's that I am forced as a part of my job to ask questions, articulate back what I've heard and understood to the people I'm talking to, then sometimes talk about it in public. I'm doing the cognitive work that we began this conversation by talking about. In other words, talking that just to pound it into my neurons in a deeper, more abiding way.
32:51 Speaker 03 Yes, that's right. And it's interesting because sometimes people who practice Buddhism say to me, well, what's this with all this emphasis on talking? Doesn't the Buddha say that listening is more important? And I'm thinking, oh, my God, here I am on 10% happier criticism of Buddha. But I don't think that's quite right.
33:10 Dan Harris? No.
33:10 Speaker 03 I think that in the case that we just talked about, where the myth that understanding equals learning, in the olden days, I would say, people learned something new and they had the mental space to ponder it and think about it themselves and do the mental work of getting it solidified and learned. But in our day to day existence now, you learn something new and then you send three emails about something different and then you scroll on your phone and then you talk to your boss and that new thing doesn't have the mental space to be encoded by your hippocampus.
33:51 Speaker 03 And talking about it is really the helper in this case and the amplifier that was started by the listening.
34:01 Dan Harris? One last little reflection on this when I was looking at this part of your book. I was thinking about a book that I read in the 90s, back when I was in my 20s and had more energy to do extreme things, but David Foster Wallace wrote a thousand-page book called Infinite Jest.
34:16 Speaker 03 Yes.
34:17 Dan Harris? That was popular among my cohort in that time. And there was just this one line that has, I can't remember much about the book, because it's been 30 years, but there's this one line that I still think about where the kid is a, the main character is a, I think, a student at a tennis academy. And this is an offhand line about how he is mentoring younger students and in explaining things to them realizes what he thinks, which is right back to your Joan Didion comment.
34:45 Speaker 03 And That's right.
34:47 Dan Harris? It's just an incredibly valuable way to encode instead of briefly absorb and then get it lost in the endless tsunami of information.
34:59 Speaker 03 That's right. And people mistakenly say, well, talking isn't learning. You already know what you know. But these examples, both the David Foster Wallace and the Joan Didion and all sorts of other personal examples are that, in fact, the act of talking is a clarifying act, really. And it helps you know what you know and learn what you know.
35:23 Dan Harris? Just to say on Buddhism, I'm not aware that the Buddha ever said that listening is more important than talking. Maybe he did, but the Buddhists did a lot of talking. There are thousands and thousands of pages of Buddhist texts, in other words, transcripts, essentially, of the stuff he said 2,600 years ago. And in his eight-part cookbook for enlightenment, The Eightfold Path, one of the entries is right speech. So I don't think he was anti-speech. Okay.
35:51 Speaker 03 Good.
35:52 Dan Harris? Moving along here, you have a whole chapter about the impact of talking on aging well, on dementia prevention, which you invoked earlier. What should we know about how to use, again, this daily activity of talking in all of its forms to help us protect our memory?
36:11 Speaker 03 Engaging with people. So there's a major social component to dementia prevention. But talking a lot and listening to people and having back-and-forth conversations and engaging with their perspectives and saying your own perspectives. Is really what seems to be critically important for developing resilience against dementia. So it sounds easy, but in fact, for elderly adults, people who have retired, it often isn't easy anymore. Have to find somebody to have a conversation with. You have to be able to get out or remember how to use Zoom or something like that.
36:56 Speaker 03 And there's a lot of data suggesting that older adults are quite isolated, quite lonely and don't have a lot of talking opportunities. And there's very little infrastructure for helping them do something different, even though it's preventive medicine in a sense, or preventive activities, preventive behaviors. And there's all sorts of discussion about how old people should go out to exercise or whatever, but there's very little realization that having them go out to talk to each other, including while they're exercising if they want, is a really good mental stimulation for them.
37:39 Dan Harris? I've really seen this with my mom, who just actually, the day before we're recording this, turned eighty-two and sent me a text saying she's happier than she's ever been. I think the major variable there is that even though she was pretty antisocial her whole life, she was a pioneering lymphoma expert and deliberately went into, after getting her medical degree, went into pathology instead of anything that would require her treating patients because she didn't want to hear people whine. She also didn't want to hear her children whine. So she was not super social as a middle-aged person, but we had the great privilege of being able to move her and my father into an assisted living facility, a really, a great one.
38:22 Dan Harris? And she's like the mayor of this place and is just going to every activity and talking. You know, they're very interactive, all the activities. And she's talking, even to people who can't even talk back, she'll talk. I think she prefers those discussions. And I just see, I think there's a direct bearing on the amount of talking she's doing and her happiness and the fact that her brain is functioning so well at the age of eighty-two. And it's just, it's awesome to see. I do want to make a note that one thing you say in the book is that Prioritizing conversation over brain games, which many people do engage with as a way to prevent against cognitive decline. You say that brain games are way less impactful than this simple act of staying in touch with
39:07 Dan Harris? people.
39:09 Speaker 03 That's right. People should play those brain games if they don't cost too much and if they're fun, but they are not known to provide any dementia prevention. Maybe crossword puzzles. There's a little bit of evidence suggesting that that might be helpful. Maybe some other word games, but the amount of money that's been poured into convincing people that brain games are going to save them is way, way higher than the actual data that brain games have any value in dementia prevention.
39:47 Dan Harris? Couple more practical questions for you. In the book, you talk about the importance of practicing for high-stakes scenarios by sort of rehearsing what you're going to say, either internally or by speaking out loud. Can you hold forth on that a little bit?
40:01 Speaker 03 Sure. I mean, we all know that athletic skill comes with enormous amount of practice and talking skill similarly comes with practice, conversation practice, and also for high-stakes situations like a job interview, career centers help people practice their job interview exactly because it's this kind of situation in which practice talking and practicing answering questions would be beneficial. And so for other kinds of high-stakes situations, of course, people practice giving speeches, but you could practice any kind of difficult
40:43 Speaker 03 conversation. You know, you have to talk to your partner about something difficult. You could practice what you wanted to say. The conversation is never going to go exactly the way you think it's going to go because the other person has different ideas naturally. But you can practice saying what you want in a clear way that's not inflaming the situation or you can practice how you might react if they push back, you know, and what would your reply be and so forth. So you can practice talking whenever you need to.
41:23 Dan Harris? I have mentioned this in past podcasts, so I apologize to regular listeners who've heard me say this before, but I feel worth noting yet again, I've for many years worked with communications coaches who help me with my interpersonal skills. One of the things that we do, when I talk to them every month or so, is rehearse for big conversations. And I've found it 100% of the time, it helps make those conversations more successful.
41:54 Speaker 03 What he said, folks, he's right.
42:01 Dan Harris? Coming up, Mary Ellen talks about why kids need chances to talk, not just watch screens, why you shouldn't judge people by the way they talk, and how companies these days are analyzing your speech patterns and why that matters in some pretty scary ways.
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43:20 Dan Harris? Okay, another practical question, and I save this toward, you know, back half of the conversation because it has to do with kids and I'm always sensitive to the fact that there are people listening who don't have kids or don't care about kids. So I'll just ask this for those of us who do have children. You are pretty adamant about the importance of not having your children get overly exposed to screens, but also not as adults using our screens too much around children because we should be talking to them and getting them talking as a way to develop their brain. I just want to give you a chance to say a little bit more about that.
43:58 Speaker 03 Right. So I think that position that you just described, my position, really comes from the science of talking and all the benefits that talking has. So, parents hear a lot that they should be talking to their kids, and that's not wrong. But what they don't hear is that they should be encouraging the kids to talk themselves. But the recent science suggests that the amount of the kids' own talking is at least as predictive of their cognitive development and their readiness for school and their learning to read and
44:37 Speaker 03 all of this as the sheer amount of talking that parents have said. And a related point is if the parents internalize this idea that the child is the sponge that needs lots of language input, they can think that, well, they can talk to them, but they also could hand them the iPad, the tablet, and have a little show talk to them. That's true, there might be some talking on the little show, but if we think that the child's own talking is so crucial, in fact, we know that it is, then having a tablet in their hands is exactly
45:19 Speaker 03 the time when they're not talking themselves and exactly the time when the parents aren't talking to them and trying to engage them in a conversation. It's a no-talking zone when the kid is on the phone or the tablet or whatever.
45:34 Dan Harris? Except, so I have, as I mentioned, an 11-year-old son and he loves video games. And he gets an hour or so a day on his iPad to play those video games. And he's doing it almost 100% of the time with his friends, talking to each other as they're playing the game. So it's a kind of intensely social thing.
45:56 Speaker 03 Yes, and I think that is really a great way to blend talking and friendship. The game Pokemon Go was also an opportunity for developing kids going outside and talking together about finding the Pokemons. And that's another, so I'm not against technology in the service of extra social interaction and talking. I think that's great. But for little kids particularly, when their early talking really affects their school readiness and all sorts of other mental development, I think that we should leave
46:35 Speaker 03 behind the screen time or reduce it as much as possible because what we really want to be doing is having situations in which the kids are talking. And if the adult is on their phone, they're not probably engaging the kid in a conversation, unless they're showing something on the phone to the kid and they're talking about it. So that would be an opportunity. But if the parent is on the phone and not paying attention to the kid, it's actually telling the kid that that phone is pretty important and that's what we ought to be doing with our time. And I don't think that's the best message, although I'm really sensitive to people telling parents what they should be doing.
47:15 Speaker 03 I have kids and everybody told me what I was doing wrong at all times and it's hard. It's a tough job being a parent. So I hope parents think about the value of the kid's own talking and try to incorporate that.
47:31 Dan Harris? Incorporate it, do your best, nobody's perfect.
47:34 Speaker 03 Yes, yes.
47:35 Dan Harris? On the nonjudgmental tip, you have a whole chapter about why we shouldn't judge other people by the way they talk. Why shouldn't we do that? Because I do find myself doing it reflexively.
47:47 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah, we all do. And it's really part of how talking works. So we all were raised in a particular place and time among particular people. And the way our talking abilities develop is that we are really tuned into that local way of speaking and acting and culture. And that stuff that we got as kids really is, in some way, the right way to do it all. And people who then go out in the world and experience other ways of talking and other
48:28 Speaker 03 cultures and all of that can get quite high and mighty, maybe more about the way people talk than culture sometimes, about other people doing it wrong. It was also established when we went to school. You know, there's lots of things in school where little kids learn about other cultures and maybe they learn about Kwanzaa, or they learn about the Native Americans and Thanksgiving, or all sorts of other cultures. But that same elementary school class very often tells kids that there's a one right way to talk, and you shouldn't say ain't, and you shouldn't do all of these other things.
49:10 Speaker 03 And so people get very protective of the way they talk and really internalize, even if they're not consciously aware of it, that there's one right way. But there's not one right way. There's hundreds of dialects of just English alone, and they're all, as linguists have studied, equally capable of conveying complex ideas. And so different accents and dialects and so forth are really social constructions, like what we wear, how we cut our hair, and our dress and so forth. And they don't have any inherent value except within a social hierarchy.
49:53 Speaker 03 All those other ways of talking are equally good.
49:57 Dan Harris? Another recommendation you make that I found surprising and interesting is that it's important to follow, and some older people can find these constantly shifting rules annoying, but you're saying that there's good reason to follow all of the new pronoun or terminology usage rules that, again, seem to shift day to day to us oldsters, not only because it's the polite thing to do, but also actually there may be some self-interested reasons for keeping up with the shifts in our language norms.
50:30 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think people really, if they can, would do better to give up the idea that the way they do it is the correct way and be more expansive and think that other ways might be okay, too. Part of the reason is they really can't change things, so it's just a source of frustration if young people are saying things that they don't know the words and so forth, and it isn't helping to be angry about it. In the book, I talk about how the grammarians of the Sanskrit language thousands and thousands of years ago got really pissed that the young folks were screwing it up in new ways, and
51:13 Speaker 03 they wrote down the grammar, and it survived for thousands of years, but they didn't stop the change. The language changed because the young people started talking differently, and all the people who are mad now were themselves young people once who were changing their language. And so they might as well just get with it. And if somebody says "no worries" rather than "you're welcome" after you thank them, well, that's just kind of a new ritualized way to do it. Go with the flow. Yeah.
51:47 Dan Harris? Well, I get that making the shift can save you on unnecessary annoyance, but I would imagine there's also some cognitive benefit to, you know, staying up with the shifts in the language, because language is always shifting and changing and evolving, that the brain benefits from staying sharp in that way.
52:03 Speaker 03 That's right. So, learning new things and... Understanding the newfangled words that people are using is a great way to feel less left out and actually stimulate your brain. And also remembering that you too were somebody who was doing all that development really, I think, helps people get another perspective because it's not that the young people are doing something never before done. Everybody has changed their language and that's natural. That's how it works.
52:37 Dan Harris? Another benefit for me is, as many parents know, using young people's slang around young people is a great way to annoy young people, which I find endlessly satisfying.
52:49 Speaker 03 Yes, yes, yes. As a professor, I found that too.
52:53 Dan Harris? Oh, yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, if you use Gen Z slang in the classroom, they cringe.
52:58 Speaker 03 Yeah. And then they think, well, you can't say that. And then I can call them out on that and we can have a conversation about how language changes. And there's no proprietary, only Gen Z people can say Gen Z slang.
53:13 Dan Harris? Finally, speaking of something that changes all the time, technology, there's a whole chapter about the intersection of talking, again, talking broadly understood, and technology. One of the things you say is that increasingly, large companies and even governments are kind of analyzing the patterns in our digital speech in ways that could be super invasive and that we should know about.
53:37 Speaker 03 Yes. So you call the helpline and you get this while you're on help, it says, "This call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes."
53:50 Speaker 03 That may or may not mean that they are recording the words you use, the tone of your voice, how likely you were to be satisfied with a $10 coupon for the fact that your product has now broken, or any other behavior that you did. So companies are analyzing talk to figure out What they can about you in the sense of can they predict your behavior? The way you talk on Facebook, does that make you likely to buy insurance? Be subject to an ad for new sugar meanies candy?
54:34 Speaker 03 Would you like to buy something? Would you be more likely to vote in some way? Would you be more likely to be persuaded on an argument to support a cause? And you don't usually think that the way we post on Facebook or talk to the hopefully human in the telephone line about getting help for your product has the capability to predict these things. But because talking is a conversion from our internal ideas into language, the patterns of language can be, with sufficient computer help and expertise,
55:14 Speaker 03 worked back to getting to understanding people's personalities, their attitudes, their likely to behave in certain ways. People were trying to monetize that all the time, companies are. And it's very hard to know exactly what they're doing.
55:29 Dan Harris? I would imagine the government, and I think you talk about that, the governments can go over our entire text and email and social media history and profile us in some way.
55:39 Speaker 03 That's right. I mean, law enforcement wants to know which people who are spewing hate speech are the ones who are likely to actually get up and attack people and which ones are just, you know, posturing. And I don't think they've worked that out yet, but they're absolutely looking on posting on various social media about which sorts of kinds of tells their language, their talking might be giving. And certainly this government, other governments, other countries could absolutely consider looking at the digital trail that we weave on social media and recordings and everything. Yeah.
56:23 Dan Harris? Yeah, I mean, I think it's probably, I guess I'm reasonably comfortable with the government trying to. Identify people who are likely to commit terrorist acts. But the idea that an autocratic government in this country could analyze our patterns of speech for thought crimes against the regime, that's troubling.
56:46 Speaker 03 Yes, it is. And I think it's very hard to know what's being analyzed or not analyzed right now, but saved and could be in the future analyzed. And people, speaking broadly, are seem remarkably unworried about privacy of their personal data. People worry about whether their credit card is going to get stolen, and I think that's not unreasonable. But I don't think they realize that their own posts on social media are a potential source of analysis of their internal states, which we all tend to think our own thoughts are private.
57:31 Speaker 03 But if our talk is reflecting with some decent probability what our internal states are, then those internal states are not, in fact, potentially private.
57:41 Dan Harris? Staying on the theme of technology, there's also a warning in the book about fake news, which I think many of us think of as a phenomenon to which other people, probably stupid people, are susceptible. But actually, if it's delivered in a sophisticated enough way and in plays to our biases, we might fall for it, too.
58:03 Speaker 03 That's right. And the number of people, many of these studies are done on college students who are reasonably educated and believe themselves to be tech savvy and all of that. And those people are remarkably susceptible to fake news. And it's quite hard to get people to become more skeptical without becoming skeptical about all sorts of other things that aren't fake. I mean, that's sort of by definition, because the fake news becomes more and more like the real news. It becomes more and more hard to distinguish them.
58:43 Speaker 03 So the alternatives are to be skeptical of everything or to be more accepting of everything. And so it's a very tricky situation at this point.
58:54 Dan Harris? Mary Ellen, I always ask two questions at the end of interviews. The first is, Is there something you were hoping to get to that we didn't get to?
59:05 Speaker 03 No, we got to the things I was hoping to get to, so thanks.
59:09 Dan Harris? Great. Second is, can you just remind everybody of the name of your book? Any other books or any other resources you've put out into the world that we should know about?
59:17 Speaker 03 My book is called More Than Words: How Talking Sharpen's the Mind and Shapes Our World. And my website, if you want to look at that, is maryellenmacdonald.com.
59:32 Dan Harris? Mary Ellen, thank you again. Great job. Great to meet you.
59:35 Speaker 03 Thanks so much. It was great to be here.
59:42 Dan Harris? Thanks again to Mary Ellen McDonald. We mentioned during the course of that discussion, my episode with Dr. James Pennebaker. I dropped a link to that episode in the show notes if you want to check it out. Also, if you want to check out my new meditation app, it's danharris.com. If you sign up, there's a two-week free trial if you want to taste test before you spend any money. And if you can't afford it, by the way, just let us know. We'll give it to you. No questions asked. Finally, thank you so much to all the people who work so incredibly hard to make this show. Our producers are Tyra Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
1:01:10 Speaker 06 OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.
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