Kelly talks to Maryellen MacDonald, a cognitive scientist with a focus on psycholinguistics, the study of how we comprehend, produce, and learn languages. Her new book is called, “More Than Words: How Talking Sharpens the Mind and Shapes Our World.” 

I was trying to explain what your book is about to people and they always responded by saying, ‘Oh, It’s a communication book.’ And I was like, no… it’s about talking. 

“Yeah, so first, imagine me pitching it to editors. I got a book about talking that’s not about communication. And though some people told me I should stop writing that book, I did find an editor who was really enthusiastic. So, here’s the story. When we talk, we think about communication. Of course, it’s for communication. And usually, we’re thinking about the effect on the person we’re communicating with. Do they understand us? Do they like us? Do they believe us? All of that. But inside our brains, there’s a whole story about how talking affects the person doing the talking. And you don’t even have to have somebody listening necessarily to get these effects of talking. Talking sharpens our attention; it helps us regulate and understand our emotions better; helps us follow through with our plans; helps kids develop school readiness; it keeps older adults sharp in old age and all sorts of stuff like that are kind of funny side benefits of the way that talking works. And I wanted to tell that story.” 

One of the things you challenge is this idea that kids are sponges when it comes to learning. 

“Well, they’re more than sponges and they’re so much more than sponges that whether you say it’s not true or not is kind of dicing the message a little bit, but they are absorbing things, but they are also acting themselves in their world and changing their world. And particularly their talking changes the kind of information they get from people. And their talking tunes their brains in the same way that the adults talking benefits them. And so, their own actions are changing their lives in important ways. And by thinking about this metaphor of sponges, we don’t really appreciate how much they need to talk, and they need to act and they need to offer opinions, and they need to engage in the world more than just being given things, given ideas, given instructions, given patterns that for them to learn they need to act to.” 

There’s an improv exercise called ‘Last Word’ that we do with business people but also in our work with law enforcement. Two people have a conversation, but the one rule is that you must start your sentence with the last word the other person said. 

“I think that it’s such a great exercise, especially toward getting people to listen all the way to the last word, because the way talking planning works is we put the new stuff that people don’t know at the end. What everybody already knows and what you’ve said before is really easy. It tends to go at the beginning of sentences because we tend to start with the easy stuff first. And so that allows us to plan the harder stuff upcoming and gives us extra time while we’re yapping about the easy stuff at the beginning and the hard, most impactful stuff usually is at the end. So, if you’re training anybody, police officers or any business leaders or anybody else to listen more, they’ll be listening more to the stuff they don’t already know at the end of sentences.” 

Photo Credit: Ethan Seidenberg