I'm Alex Hongle, professional rock climber and founder of the Hongle Foundation.
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Today on Something You Should Know, what's the best way to make cut flowers in a vase last longer?
Then habituation, this thing we humans do, where we just get used to things, sometimes for good, sometimes not.
A great analogy is the AC going in the background, so the noise of the air conditioner is there, but you really don't notice how annoying it is until someone turns it off.
And then you're suddenly oh, I'm so glad.
We think social media is a little bit like that.
Also, if you need to figure something out, you might want to lie down and how to really connect with others in a conversation, and why it's so important.
When we're in a conversation and we're really connecting with each other, your pupils will start to dilate at the same rate.
In fact, this is probably happening between you and me right now.
And most importantly, there's these electrical impulses within our brains.
People start to think the same way.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
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Something you should know.
Fascinating intel.
The world's top experts.
And practical advice you can use in your life.
Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hi, welcome.
I appreciate you taking time out of your day to listen to another episode of Something You Should Know.
I want to start today talking about flowers because everybody has given flowers or received flowers.
And the problem with flowers is, of course, they don't last all that long.
You've probably heard the advice that one way to keep flowers fresher longer is to put aspirin in the water.
Actually, the results are mixed on that.
In fact, one research paper published by the International Society for Horticultural Science back in 2012 found that aspirin actually reduced the shelf life of cut flowers.
It isn't clear that the flowers are really able to absorb the aspirin to get any benefits.
Then there is that little packet of flower food that comes with the flowers.
According to one test, it helps.
It helps for about four days or so.
But after that, the effects seem to wear off and the flowers start to deteriorate pretty rapidly.
Interestingly, what does seem to help keep flowers perkier and fresher longer is Viagra.
In a test, one milligram of Viagra was crushed and put into the water and it kept the flowers perky for almost two weeks, compared to similar flowers without Viagra that started wilting in just a few days.
And that is something you should know.
I think you're going to like this.
There's something that we humans do.
It's actually impossible not to do, I think.
And that is, we get used to things.
Good things and bad things.
You could get your dream car.
It's so exciting when you get your dream car, but after a while...
It's just your car.
You stop noticing how dreamy it is.
Or you get a new boss who's really horrible.
I mean, you're outraged.
But after a while, eh, just a bad boss.
You can't stay outraged forever, so you just stop noticing it.
The word is habituate.
We habituate to things.
We stop noticing things.
And it's really interesting what our natural tendency to habituate does to us.
And I suspect you've never really stopped to think about it.
So now you can, along with my guest, Tali Sherritt.
Tali is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and at MIT.
And she is founder and director of the Effective Brain Lab.
She's co-author of a book called Look Again, The Power of Noticing What Was Always There.
Hi, Tali.
Welcome to Something You Should Know.
Thanks, Michael.
I'm glad to be on it.
So explain a little more about our tendency to habituate.
Sure.
It's kind of a puzzle that people have these wonderful things in their life.
Perhaps it's a great job, a loving family, a comfortable house, but those things often have a limited impact on our daily happiness.
And so why is that?
And at the same time, there's terrible things around us like sexism and racism, cracks in our personal relationships and efficiencies at the workplace.
And those also seem to go unnoticed if they're there, if they've been there for a long time.
And so that's kind of the puzzle that we start off with, right?
Why are those wonderful things in our lives don't keep us happy and don't bring us joy for a long time?
And what about those terrible things?
How is it that we kind of overlook them and can't really see them?
Well, you probably have to imagine that maybe it plays a role.
I mean if something horrible happens to you, your child dies or something you've got to find a way to get on with your life.
And by habituating or by being able to accept that, I guess that makes it easier.
Yeah, absolutely.
So on the one hand, so, okay, let's name this process that we're talking about.
It's called habituation, okay?
And habituation is basically our tendency to respond less and less and less to things that are constant, that are always there.
So a really like intuitive example is you walk into a room full of smoke and at the beginning the smoke is really overwhelming, right?
The smell is salient.
But studies show that within 20 minutes, you cannot detect the smoke any longer, right?
Your olfactory neurons stop responding to the smoke.
And in a similar manner.
Just as we stop responding to different smells or stop responding to the cold of a pool when we jump in, we also stop responding to these wonderful and terrible things in our lives.
And so you're saying, well, that's, you know, it's a good thing.
And you're right.
I mean, habituation is there for a reason.
It has an adaptive purpose.
And one of the adaptive purposes is that if something bad happens to us, even something really terrible like a loss of a loved one, it is good that over time we adapt and we don't feel the pain as much, right.
And we can go on with our lives.
But, as with most of these rules that our brain functions by there is the good side and the bad side, right.
And so the problem here, and especially in how we habituate to the less so good things in our life, is that we may stop noticing them and then we don't try to change them, right.
Now, if it's something that you cannot change, It's good that you habituate you don't think about it, you don't notice it, you don't respond, you don't feel bad about it.
But if it's something that we can change around us, and both in our personal life, right?
Maybe it's a relationship that has gone sour, or it could be societal problems.
Then for those things it is a problem if it doesn't bother us anymore because we won't be driven to change.
I'm sure everybody's had that experience of getting something new and exciting like a car.
I remember when I got my house the house I live in now when I first walked into it to look at it, I just knew it.
For me, this was a great house, and I wanted this house.
But I knew.
I knew then, and it has come to be, that...
Now it's just my house.
I mean, it's a nice house, but it's not as exciting now as it was then.
Yeah, and I have the same experience.
And here's the thing, and you may have felt this as well.
If you go for a while, if you go on a business trip, you know you're out for like even a few days, maybe a week, maybe two, and then you come back.
You may have noticed that it kind of and we call it re-sparkles, right.
Suddenly you get that feeling again that you had the first few weeks when you moved into your house, that kind of feeling of awe.
Because when you are apart, away from this thing that you've habituated to, in this case your home, then you dis-habituate meaning dis-habituate you start responding again.
You start noticing again.
There is a great quote from Jodie Foster, which I actually, I heard her say this.
So she talks about going away to film for six months.
She's out in a different country.
Six months later she comes back to her home and she said i came back from somewhere that is amazing and beautiful, but you know you long for really dumb things that you're just used to.
That six months ago i'm sure i was bored by, but right now i'm like my god, avocados are amazing, or i'm so glad i get to go to the gym again things that six months ago were sort of what i was trying to escape from.
Now everything is amazing, and so what she's describing is what we call re-sparkling, That things that you habituate to like your home, or just mundane things around you.
If you take a break from them, either intentionally or unintentionally, when you come back to them you kind of get that joy.
It triggers a joy again.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Absolutely.
In fact, we quote Esther Perrault, the very famous relationship therapist.
And she says that, after serving many many, many couples, what she found is that people are most attracted to their partners in two situations.
One is when they went away and then they come back, right?
Absence.
And the other, which is related, is when they see the partner in a situation.
That's novel, that's new.
Like, for example, their partner is talking to strangers or their partner is on a stage something unusual.
That's when they feel attracted.
And I think those two cases are cases of dishabituating, right?
Yeah.
Suddenly responding and suddenly noticing what you did maybe 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, but you kind of stopped after a while.
Yeah well, I've always felt that that you know getting away from something helps you appreciate it more when you come back, when you take a break.
But it's not only taking breaks from your life itself.
It's also taking breaks from things that you would never imagine that you should or would want to take breaks from.
For example, we quote this study that was done where people were asked the following question.
Think about a song that you really like.
And the question is would you rather hear the song, listen to the song from beginning to end with no interruptions whatsoever, or Or would you rather have breaks throughout the song right?
20 second, you listen to the song, a break, 20 second break and so on.
So of course, 99% of the people say, I would rather listen to the song uninterrupted, right?
It makes intuitive sense.
But in fact, when they actually test this, they did an experiment.
They have one group of people listen to the song from beginning to end and another group having interruptions.
They found that those people who had breaks, who had the song interrupted, they actually enjoyed the song more overall right.
And they were willing to pay double to listen to the song in concert.
And so the reason that the offers of the study suggest is that when you start listening to a song that you really like, you really enjoy it.
But after a while, the joy goes down, you habituate, right?
But then if you take a break and come back to the song, the joy can bounce back.
And so overall, you can enjoy this positive experience more if you have breaks.
They did the same thing with massages.
And they found people enjoy massage more if there's breaks rather than no interruptions.
And so that is something that you could really use in many different situations.
We suggest, for example, take shorter vacations, but more of them rather than one long one.
And when it comes to the negative things, you should do the opposite.
So if it's things that you really do not enjoy like, for example, it's household chores or it's admin work, we
Usually, like our intuition is, oh, let's just have a little break here and there.
But in fact, what that same studies show is that if you do the unpleasant task from beginning to end, no interruptions, you will suffer less because you will habituate to the bad.
Right.
But if you take breaks, let's say you're cleaning your house and you're taking breaks.
Every time you take a break, you dissipate from the bad.
And then we go back.
You suffer more.
Right.
So we say, you know, break up the good, but swallow the bad hole.
We're talking about how we get used to things, how we habituate to things, and why it's good and sometimes not so good.
My guest is Tali Sherritt.
She is author of the book, Look Again, The Power of Noticing What Was Always There.
We'll be right back.
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So Tali, that song thing just makes no sense to me because it would seem so frustrating to be listening and going.
Oh, here comes my favorite part.
Oh, man, what'd you stop the song for?
I mean, I would find that, I would think I would find that so frustrating.
Absolutely.
It's so unintuitive.
And they actually show 99% of the people say, no, I don't think I would enjoy it more with breaks.
So it's one of those results that is hard for us to imagine.
It's true.
It's unintuitive.
When you actually measure people's responses, that's what they found.
Wow.
So, yeah, some other ways to do this.
Well, before we get into the other ways to do this, a lot of times people will talk about you know, appreciate what you have and try not to habituate.
Like you, don't take for granted the beautiful view out your kitchen window, even though over time, of course, you're going to
But you could kind of make an effort not to to really appreciate it a year or two years later, but it's not quite the same as the day you moved in.
Yeah, there's something to novelty.
Novelty is something that we definitely respond to, and the brain attends to things that are novel in response to things that are novel, and it should do.
Again, it's adaptive, because if something is novel, we're not quite sure is it, how good is it or how threatening is it?
So it makes sense for our brain to be very attentive and very responsive to things that are novel.
What are some other ways that we can dishabituate?
If that's the word, I guess that's the word dishabituate.
We talk about these things, we suspect that are probably affecting us in a negative way, but they're always in the background.
So you can't really tell how bad are they really for you.
A great analogy is the AC kind of going in the background.
So the noise of the air conditioner is there, but you really don't notice how annoying it is until someone turns it off.
And then you're suddenly, oh, I'm so glad I feel so much better now without that noise.
We think social media is a little bit like that.
Studies suggest that social media does have a negative effect on people's mental health.
But people don't really realize to what extent.
And without taking a break from social media, you wouldn't really know.
There is a great study that was conducted by the economist Hunt Alcott.
What he did was he gave 1,000 individuals $100 each in order to quit Facebook for a month.
This is quite an old study, so it was conducted on Facebook.
And then he gave another group of 1,000 individuals $100 to just go on with life as usual.
They didn't do anything special.
At the end of the month he came back to all these people and he gave them a questionnaire on how happy they are.
Are they anxious?
Are they depressed?
And so on.
He found that looking at every single measure of well-being, People were happier, less anxious, less depressed after they quit Facebook for a month.
And what was interesting was that most of the people were surprised by this impact.
They kind of suspected before that probably it has a little bit of a negative effect on them, but they didn't realize how much of a negative effect it had on them.
And What's surprising to me was that, despite the fact that most people said I'm happier now, I'm more likely I have time to play the piano, to meet friends,
At the end of the month, they went straight back to Facebook.
So there seems to be something kind of addictive within social media.
But I think at the very least.
At that point, they made an informed decision.
They had this experience of being out, breaking out, not being on social media, not being on Facebook for a month.
They knew how it felt, and then they can make a decision of what it was that they really want.
And I think one of our points is kind of what we call experiments in living, right?
You really don't know what is really good for you or what is really bad for you until you kind of experiment and take so try to think about how can you change, how can you diversify your life to do these little experiments, to find what it is that you're not doing.
That could be quite great.
And what is it that you are doing that maybe is not that good for you and you might want to change.
Another point when it comes to dishabituation and what you could do is this interesting relationship between dishabituation and creativity.
So there are interesting studies showing that people who habituate slower tend to be more creative.
So people who have patents under their name, who have written books, who have exhibitions in museums and so on, Studies show they tend to habituate slower.
There's ways to measure your habituation.
For example, I can have a sound play over and over and over and I can measure your response to it, your physiological response.
So I can measure your habituation.
And so the question is, why is it that people who habituate slower are more creative?
And I think the reason is that they are less likely to filter information.
Sounds, images, smells, knowledge, they stay in their mind longer.
And it could really be distracting.
But once in a while, this mishmash of information in your mind can form some unexpected combinations that lead to innovation and creativity right.
Think about these things kind of like floating around in your mind for longer.
They're not really related to each other, but you haven't fiddled them out.
And then suddenly they come together to create this really interesting idea.
And so, of course, the question is how can we promote this habituation in ourself in order to hopefully foster creativity?
And what studies suggest is that the answer is changing your environment.
Simple changes, meaning you're working in your office and then you can go work in a coffee shop.
You can get up and go for a walk, go for a run, then come back to your office and so on.
These simple changes in your environment, studies show, will enhance creativity.
Now just to say that these enhancement of creativity, according to the studies, only last for about six minutes every time you change.
But I think sometimes those six minutes can be critical.
Those can be the minutes where you really come up with this kind of innovative thought.
When you stop and think about all of the things that we habituate to, like creativity, Like you were talking about, the air conditioning, like you only notice it when it's not there, or the heating in your house, or electricity if the power goes out.
I mean, you just take all of these things for granted.
You become so habituated to them until they disappear, and then you appreciate them.
And it's like when you're ill, right?
When you feel ill, you think to yourself, oh, being healthy is such a privilege.
But then when you are, of course, healthy and you don't have a cold or COVID or whatever it is, you tend to forget about it, right?
When things are constant, they don't grab your attention.
And so you don't think about them and you kind of move on.
So you're suggesting we break up what's so constant in order to notice it, to see it, to pay attention?
Absolutely.
So breaking things up diversifying, those are ways by which we can have, we can notice the things that are around us.
Again, once you go away and then you come back, you just see things in different eyes right, and so you're more likely to detect those things that are joyful, but also those things that are not.
That you may, you may want to change.
You know what i wonder you were talking about.
Like if you, if you go away and then come back, you kind of have a renewed appreciation for whatever your home, your dog, your wife, whatever But if you travel a lot and go and come, and go and come, do you habituate to that and then it's no big deal?
Yes and no.
You cannot habituate to change, right?
If you go from A to B, and it's the same A and the same B, right?
You go from like, you're always going from Tokyo to New York, Tokyo to New York.
So you could, to some extent, habituate to this to some degree, but still...
Every time when you come back to Tokyo after you've been in New York for a while, you will still see things differently.
I don't think it will actually be eliminated.
I mean, I experienced this myself because I live both in London and Boston.
I've been doing that for 10 years.
And still, every time I'm away, whether it's for a few weeks or a few months, and then I come back, I absolutely have this feeling of dishabituating and feeling and seeing things again.
And why is it that when you change your environment that that stirs things up?
When you change your environment, it's a new environment.
What happens is you are triggering learning.
You need to learn, right?
If I'm now in a new city, I need to learn about the city, like where things are.
If I'm now working on a new project with a new team, I need to learn about the different people, maybe the hierarchies and things like that.
Anytime that you're changing, you actually are putting yourself in a state of learning.
And what's really interesting is that it turns out that learning is a trigger for joy.
There's a wonderful study by two neuroscientists, Bastian Blain and Rob Rutledge.
And what they did is they had people, volunteers, play a game.
And if they played well, they could get money.
And every time that people got money, they were happy, right?
They like money.
But it turns out that they were even happier when they learned something new about the game, especially something that they could use.
So their kind of conclusion was that learning, in fact, brings you more joy than monetary goods.
Well, when you think about all the things you've habituated to the good things and the bad things it's amazing that we just get used to stuff now.
And what if we didn't?
And I love your advice about if there are things you enjoy, break them up.
You'll enjoy them more.
And things you don't enjoy, don't break them up.
Get them done and you'll suffer less.
I've been speaking with Tali Sherritt.
She's a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College in London and at MIT.
And she's author of a book called Look Again, The Power of Noticing What Was Always There.
And there's a link to that book in the show notes.
Thanks, Tali.
Thanks for being here.
Thank you so much, Michael.
This was really fun.
I'm so relieved.
No problem.
I'll be with you every step of the way.
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My guess is you know someone who you really like talking to.
Because when you talk to them, they make you feel smarter.
They make you feel like you're being listened to.
They make you feel like what you say has some validity.
And the conversations with those people just flow.
So what is it about those people in those conversations?
Is it an innate skill they have or some trait that they possess?
Or can anyone be one of those people?
Is it all about what they say or how they say it or both?
Well, here to discuss all this is Charles Duhigg.
Charles has been a guest here before.
He's taken a look at this ability, this phenomenon, and written a book about it called Super Communicators How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.
Hey, Charles, welcome back to Something You Should Know.
Thanks for having me on.
So I sort of set up what a super communicator is, but you go ahead and take the ball and run with it.
Yeah.
So we all know super communicators.
In fact, if I was to ask you if you were having a really bad day and there was someone you could call who you know would make you feel better, does a name pop into your mind right away?
Yeah, sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think almost everyone listening probably has a person like that.
And that person for you is a super communicator.
That's someone who knows how to not only listen to you, but make you feel listened to.
They know how to speak in a way that you want to hear what they have to say.
And what we know is that there are some people who actually can do this much more consistently, who can basically connect with anyone.
They are that person for lots and lots of different people.
And It's not because they're born with any special skills.
In fact, we know that communication is just a set of skills that any of us can learn.
And it's not that they're more charismatic or more of an extrovert.
It's that literally they've just thought a little bit more about how to communicate.
And that thinking puts us in a place where we can connect with other people much, much better.
So I can think of...
One person who I would categorize as a superstar super communicator.
He has since passed away, but he is one of those guys that you just couldn't wait to talk to him.
You felt so good when you hung up the phone or walked away.
There was something about the way and I've always wondered and I'm glad you talk about this because I don't know what that is
I assume it had something to do with the person.
I mean, there's something about him, but there's something else there.
And so that's exactly what I think you're talking about.
Yeah.
Well, there's a couple of things that he probably did which I'll ask you about and you can tell me if this lines up with your experiences with him.
And they are things that any of us can learn to do.
My guess is that one of the things that he did is that he made you feel like he was listening really closely, like he was hearing what you were having to say.
Is that right?
Sure, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
And probably the way he was doing that was through some variation of what's known as looping for understanding.
And looping for understanding.
Is actually this technique that they teach people when they become negotiators or when they become conflict mediators?
And it just has these three steps, but we can use it in any conversation.
I use it with my wife all the time, which is, first of all, you should ask a question, right?
And some questions are more powerful than other questions, and we can talk about those.
The second step is that you should repeat back what the person just said in your own words.
And the reason we do this is to prove to them that we're listening.
Because often, particularly when we're in a conflict, particularly when we're discussing something difficult,
We don't know if the other person is actually listening or just waiting their turn to talk.
And so when they repeat back what we just said, it makes us feel heard.
It proves to us that they've heard us.
And then the third step, and this is the one most people forget, is ask if you got it right.
Because when you do that, what you're doing is you're giving the other person permission to tell you if there's something that you didn't pick up on.
And what we know is that if you use this technique and my guess is that your friend did this very, very gracefully, so gracefully you probably didn't even notice he was doing it, but that when he does that, what happens is and this is hardwired into our brains we feel closer and more trusting of the other person and because we believe that they have listened to us, we become more likely to listen to them.
And so basically your steps that you just ran through could be printed on one page, but you wrote a whole book, so there must be more to it than that.
So there's more to it than that.
That's absolutely right.
So looping for understanding is one skill that super communicators seem to possess and use on a regular basis.
Another, as I mentioned, is that they tend to ask special questions.
And these questions don't necessarily seem special, but they're known as deep questions within psychology.
And a deep question is just something that asks us about our values, our beliefs or our experiences.
And it can be pretty easy to ask.
A deep question doesn't necessarily seem deep.
So for instance, if I bumped into you on the street and I said, what do you do for a living?
And you say, oh, I'm a lawyer.
I might say, oh, wow, do you love practicing the law?
What made you decide to go to law school?
What's the best part of being a lawyer?
Those are all easy questions to ask right, they don't seem overly intrusive, but what they do is they tell me things about what your experiences were that led you to to go to law school, what your values are that make you passionate about your job, what your beliefs are that you bring to work, and when you describe that to me, i learned so much about you.
And then the other thing that a deep question does is, let's say, i ask you those questions and you answer them and i learn something about you.
Then, even if you don't ask a question back, it's very natural for me to say oh you know, it's interesting that you love interacting with people as a lawyer.
I'm a doctor.
And that's also my favorite part of being a doctor is that I get to meet with these patients and I get to help them when they're worried.
It allows for that back and forth that's very, very natural.
And one thing we know about super communicators is that they ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person.
Some of them we don't even register because they're things like, how would you say next?
What do you think of that?
But in asking those questions, they allow us to explain who we are.
And then they set it up so that they can explain who they are.
And that's where connection comes from.
But it does seem that you don't necessarily need to be a super communicator all the time.
It seems like that would get pretty exhausting.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
I mean...
You don't have to have conversations all the time, right?
And that's an important part of this is deciding when you want to have a conversation.
And when I turn to my kids and I say I'd like to have a conversation about your rooms, I'm not actually asking for a conversation about their rooms, right?
I want to tell them that they need to go clean their rooms.
And I think that that's important is deciding when we want to have these conversations.
One of the stories in the book is about this CIA officer who joined the CIA and he was just terrible, terrible at recruiting overseas spies.
And that was his job.
So he gets sent to Europe after trying to get into the CIA for years.
And he's basically going to get fired because he does such a bad job of this.
And then eventually he meets this young woman who is on vacation.
She works for the foreign ministry in her government back in the Middle East.
And he gets to know her and they become friends.
And eventually he says, I'm with the CIA.
Would you come work for us?
And she just panics.
She says, I can't believe, like, no, they kill people in my country for that.
I can't believe you didn't tell me.
This is so dangerous.
And he tells his bosses that he couldn't recruit her.
And his bosses are like, look, you are definitely going to get fired.
We already told people that you were going to recruit her.
So he has this one last dinner with her.
And during that dinner, instead of trying to charm her, instead of trying to persuade her, he just decides to have an honest conversation.
She was really disappointed about what's going on.
She's disappointed.
She's about to go back to her home country and, and, and feels powerless.
And he told her how powerless he feels is like this guy who's supposed to recruit spies in Europe.
And he's terrible at the job that he just feels, feels like he can't do it at all.
They matched each other.
And in that matching, they were able to form a connection.
And she actually became not only a spy for him, but the best middle, the best asset in the middle East for the next 20 years.
But the reason why is because he decided to have a conversation with her.
And that doesn't mean that we have to have conversations all the time, but it does mean during those moments that are meaningful, with our partners or our kids or coworkers, sometimes it's worth leaning a little bit in and having the real conversation, because that's how we get closer.
So when you say matching, what are we matching here?
Yeah, it's a really good question.
And to explain it, I should tell you sort of how I came to studying this, which is, I would oftentimes come home from work and I would be upset, had a bad day, right.
And I would describe my day to my wife and my boss is a jerk or my coworkers don't appreciate me.
And she would very reasonably respond with advice.
She would say why don't you take your boss out to lunch and you guys can get to know each other better?
Instead of hearing what she was saying, i would get even more upset and i'd be like why aren't you supporting me?
You know you should be outraged on my behalf.
And then she would get upset because i was.
I was acting irrationally and and i'm a professional like communicator, i'm a journalist and i couldn't figure out why this kept happening.
And so i went to all these experts and i said tell me what i'm doing wrong.
And they said well, It's this thing called the matching principle.
And to understand how it works, you got to understand.
We all think of a discussion as being about one thing, right?
We're talking about my day or where we're going to go on vacation.
But what the research shows us from the last decade is that every discussion is actually made up of different kinds of conversations.
In particular, there are three big buckets that most of those conversations fall into.
There are practical discussions where we're trying to solve a problem, make plans.
There are emotional conversations where I want to tell you how I feel, but I don't want you to solve that for me.
I want you to empathize.
And then there are social conversations, which is about how do we relate to each other and how do we relate to society?
And they said the thing is, if you're not having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, then you won't really communicate with each other.
You'll fail to hear each other.
And so, when you came home, you were having an emotional conversation and your wife responded with a practical conversation.
And both of those are legitimate conversations.
But because you were having different conversations at the same moment, you couldn't connect.
You couldn't really hear each other and hear what each other needed.
And so the answer is the matching principle, this thing that in psychology says, in order to communicate and connect with someone, we need to figure out what kind of conversation is happening, whether it's practical, emotional or social.
And then we need to match each other, either by me matching you or inviting you to match me.
And then, once we're aligned what's known within psychology as neural entrainment then we can move from topic to topic and type of conversation to type of conversation.
Together we'll be able to hear each other.
How do you do that dance, though?
How do you?
How do you if you're not in the same conversation when you say you invite, how do you invite someone to have the same conversation you're having?
Yeah, it can sound like a lot, right.
As I'm describing it now.
And this is where we get lucky as humans, because our brains are optimized to do this once we know what to look for.
So one of the first things you can do is you can ask one of these deep questions, right?
The reason why deep questions are so powerful is not only do they allow us to kind of get to know each other, they also often will tell you what kind of conversation the other person is looking for.
So think about the difference that if I asked you, why'd you become a lawyer?
Someone who says well, I really wanted to be able to support my family and I knew I'd always have a job as a lawyer versus someone who says well, I saw my dad get arrested as a kid and I always wanted to fight for the underdog.
Those are very different conversations and they might be the response of the same person depending on the mindset that they're in.
But the first one suggests to me, oh, you're in a practical mindset.
We should talk about finance.
The second one is much more emotional or even potentially social.
They were talking about how we feel about our parents and about injustice.
What's going on in society?
So the first thing to do is to ask that deep question just to figure out what kind of conversation is happening right now.
Then the second thing we can do is we can just ask permission.
So when I come home from work now and I start complaining about my day, my wife will often say do you want me to help you solve this?
Or do you just need to get this off your chest?
Are you just venting?
And I actually love it when she asks that, because sometimes until that moment I have not stopped to figure out what I want from this conversation.
I haven't stopped to figure out why I'm complaining.
And I can say to her, no, I just want you to listen.
It's not a big deal.
Or I can say, yeah, let's solve this together.
So oftentimes, simply asking and getting permission to find out what kind of conversation is happening is really powerful.
And in fact in schools they teach teachers to do this by asking students when they come up with something.
Do you want to be helped?
Do you want to be hugged?
Or do you want to be heard?
And those, of course, are the three conversations, the practical, the emotional, and the social.
But sometimes it's as simple as that, just asking someone, what do you need from this conversation?
And then telling them what you are hoping to get from this conversation as well.
Well, one of the things that is interesting about this is it sounds very deliberate.
Like you really have to say, okay, I'm now going to do my super communication thing.
Because so much of what we say to other people is just a reaction.
It just blurts out.
It's not this thoughtful, do you want to hug?
It's just whatever you say.
So, if you think about it, what's really interesting about how our brains have evolved the capacity to communicate is that the reason why communication is so important to the homo sapiens is because whoever could communicate the best survived the longest.
They were able to build families and societies and cultures that helped them persist.
And when we're in a conversation and we're really connecting with each other, Something interesting happens to our bodies.
We never, of course, notice this, but if you could pay attention, the person you're talking to, your pupils will start to dilate at the same rate.
In fact, this is probably happening between you and me right now.
We start breathing at similar rates.
And most importantly, there's these electrical impulses within our brains.
They start to match each other.
They start to look similar.
People start to think the same way.
And if you think about it, that makes sense, right?
Because when I talk, what I'm trying to do is describe a feeling or an idea.
And I'm hoping that you experience that same feeling or that same idea.
Now, the issue is that you're right.
It can feel like a lot when we describe it this way.
But because our brains are designed in such a manner, building these communication habits is very, very easy.
And there's just one kind of overarching thing that you can remind yourself of that allows those instincts to come out, which is the goal of a conversation is to understand the other person.
It's not to convince them of something.
It's not to win a fight.
It's literally to understand what they are saying and to help them understand what you are saying.
And if you do that, then even if you both walk away disagreeing with each other, the conversation has been a success.
How do you have one of those kinds of conversations?
That you're talking about a very thoughtful trying to understand what the other person is saying and get them when they're not on the same page as you are.
They want to fight or they want to argue or they want to, you know, just tell you what they think.
How do you get them on your page when they're so not?
So a big part of it is, as I mentioned, not all conversations have to be conversations, right?
Sometimes someone's in the wrong frame of mind and it's okay to say, let's table this.
Let's bring this up tonight when we might be a little bit more relaxed.
The second thing you can do is that, proving that we're listening, that looping for understanding when we're asking a question, repeating back what we just heard in our own words, asking if we got it right.
That's going to convince the other person that we want to understand them and they're going to want to understand us in return.
It's almost hardwired in our brain.
We can't help ourselves but want to connect when someone is looping for understanding.
But the third and the most important thing is just to ask the person, what do you want out of this?
There's this process at the beginning of every conversation that psychologists and economists refer to as a quiet negotiation, where we're trying to figure out not only what we're going to talk about, but how we're going to talk about it.
Is it okay to interrupt each other?
Is this a formal chat or a casual conversation?
During that quiet negotiation, one of the most powerful things you can do is simply say look, you seem like you're upset and I want to understand why.
I might not agree with you, but I want to understand.
Can you tell me what's going on that's made you a little bit agitated?
That's making the quiet negotiation a little bit louder.
But when we do that, oftentimes what happens is the reason we're upset.
The reason we're agitated is because we don't feel like the other person is listening or wants to understand us.
We wonder if they're just waiting their turn to speak.
And so if we prove to them that we want to listen, through looping for understanding, by asking deep questions, then oftentimes it takes that agitation out of the equation.
And that doesn't mean we'll agree with each other, but it does mean that we're trying to understand each other.
Yeah, I get that.
I get that.
So if I'm, if I'm new to this, cause I'm new to this, help me like get into that frame of mind.
Like so how to?
I'm going to have a conversation with you and I want to do what you're talking about.
How do I, if I'm initiating, how do I approach it together? to get the wheels turning here?
So I think the first thing to do is to ask a question and to ask a deep question.
So, for instance let's, let's say I'm the, I'm the one I bump into you and I say Hey Hey, how are you?
Like you know, I could ask you things like what you do today or how are things going, but those aren't going to produce much for us to discuss, right?
So I might say hey, I'm just wondering, like you know, I love your podcast what's the best podcast interview you ever did?
I imagine it's not just me, but I've had that experience of feeling much more super communicator-ish in some conversations than others, like I, like I'm really nailing it and getting it, but clearly you can do it deliberately in following some of your suggestions, be much better at it and be much more consistent at it.
That's exactly right.
And not only that, but like one of the things we know is that people who are consistent super communicators.
They are more popular than other folks.
They are elected to like leadership positions more often.
They are often more financially successful.
And that totally makes sense, because if you're someone who everyone likes to have in a conversation, you get invited into more conversations and you learn about these opportunities that other people might not know about.
And we tend to think of super communicators as being these, like extroverts charismatic, Bill Clinton-like figures.
But usually they're not.
Well as somebody who's in the communication business.
I always enjoy these conversations where you peel the onion back and dissect the elements of communication and see how it works.
This has been great.
I've been speaking with Charles Duhigg and the name of his book is Super Communicators How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.
And if you'd like to read it, you can buy it at Amazon, and there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes.
Appreciate it, Charles.
This was great.
Thank you so much, Mike.
This has been an absolute blast.
The next time you're struggling to find an answer, come up with a solution, something like that you might want to try lying down.
In an Australian study, participants were asked to solve problems and find solutions in a number of different positions.
Those who laid flat on their backs out-solved those who were standing or sitting.
Apparently, this is because lying down slows the brain's production of chemicals, which can actually help us think more creatively and make connections between unrelated concepts.
And that is something you should know.
It's been a while since I asked for reviews and consequently we haven't gotten as many as we usually do.
So let me kind of crank up the machine here and ask if you would please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts Spotify, wherever you want to leave us a review.
It's a good way to show your support, and it really helps.
I'm Mike Carruthers.
Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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