September 2, 2016.
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Uri Hasson:
This is Your Brain on Communication
“Even across different languages, our brains show similar activity, or become “aligned,” when we hear the same idea or story”, says Uri Hasson, Neuroscientist, Princeton University.
On June 19 last year we reported on the extremely interesting 2010 research and discoveries by Princeton researchers, lead by neuroscientist Uri Hasson, about how we communicate and connect with our listeners—using MRI scans to analyze brain activity during communication between speaker and listener.
Hasson and his team at Princeton have continued and expanded their original experiments, and in this fascinating TED talk in February this year he provides further insights from their research since 2010.
TED Feb 2016
Hasson has also researched how people respond to movies, such as Hitchcock’s Vertigo, using MRI scanning.
Verbal communication is a joint activity between speakers and listeners—but despite much research over the years, studies of human communication had primarily been done by analyzing individual brains.
However in their pioneering research the Princeton University researchers for the first time started using MRI brain scans to analyze communication between a speaker telling a story and a group of listeners.
They found that not only were parts of the listeners’ brains activated by listening to the story— the same parts of the brain of listeners and storyteller lit up. In other words: stories literally synchronize our brains.

Speaker-Listener Neural Coupling
Another interesting finding was that with a high level of understanding and engagement, some regions of listeners’ brains lit up before the corresponding activity in the speaker’s brain—as if they were anticipating the next part of the story.
With a low level of understanding and little active engagement, there was no such brain activity. So in order to truly connect with your audience, tell a story that will present your message in a compelling way—and which your audience will not forget.
The research on this topic since 2010 by Uri Hasson and his team has focused on why this synchronization happens. Is it the words, the sound or the meaning of the story? Some of the findings have been published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. His TED talk provides answers to this and other related questions, with significant implications for speakers and business leaders alike.
Trond Varlid
Access more TED videos:
http://www.ted.com/
This article first appeared in the EMC Quest newsletter series.