A research conducted at Princeton University in 2010 revealed the impact of storytelling on brain activity: during a storytelling the speaker and the listeners’ brains are synchronized. The neuroscientist Uri Hasson* has recorded the brain activity of a group of people listening a real-life story told by a speaker and the results brought out a mind-meld between them. The same regions of the brain were activated at the same moment in both the listeners and the speaker meaning that the person doing the talking was able through his story to “plant” ideas, thoughts, memories and emotions into the listeners’ brain. Hasson’s research scientifically proves that storytelling triggers sync up or brain-to-brain coupling because stories are able to activate language, sensory, visual and motor areas. I was very excited reading about these lab results because they confirmed my intuition about the capability of Sign Language to sync up brains: expressing/interpreting concepts using gestures activate the motor and visual area, of course, but also the sensory and emotional area through the use of facial expressions. Professor Hasson studies the “ideas transfer” between two brains during verbal communication and he compares mutual understanding to “clicking with someone” or “sync-dancing with a partner”. Using visual rather than verbal communication, like Sign Language, could enhance the connection’s strength between the minds? As visualisation has a stronger and quicker impact on the brain, the answer is probably a yes. An image created through imagination is most likely to shrink the cultural imprint in the listener’s mind. For instance, when you express a concept like freedom in American Sign Language, you will cross your arms and fists in front of the chest and open them up as a sign of liberation. In verbal communication the word freedom could make people think to different things, like the Second Amendment and guns or social justice and equality. In American Sign Language, whatever the cultural background of the speaking partners, they will both keep in mind this image of freedom, diminishing the influence of their former exposure to the word and the interpretations that previously have been transmitted to them. In our Talking hands workshops designed for corporate audiences, we encourage the group to practice its new communicative skills by telling personal stories to each other using Sign Language. By practicing Sign Language along with honing their narrative art, their mental connection gets stronger. As the participants have very limited signing skills, they must rely on synchronizing their brains and their hearts to understand each other, both from a linguistic and an emotional standpoint.If they want to express joy or disappointment, they have to draw on their comedian or dramatic talent and use correctly their grimacing ability. As a conclusion, I assume that using Sign instead of (or together with) Spoken Language could make mutual understanding and, at the end, consensus more likely to emerge. Watching the Professor Hasson’s Ted Talk**, I was struck by the beauty of the metronomes clicking first out of phase and how the vibrations transmitted by the cylinder underneath all of them could get the metronomes clicking in phase. Wahoo, it was magical!This little experience shows us Professor Hasson’s idea of “physical entrainment turning to neural entrainment”. Well, my turn to make a parallel: what if the metronomes were our brains and the cylinder the Sign Language?
*Professor of Psychology at the Neuroscience Institute at Princeton University
**Vancouver Feb 2016 TED talk, “This is Your Brain on Communication”
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