Three Little Words
How words can cause physical harm.
“I can text three little words to my friend in Belgium,” said Lisa Feldman Barrett, “and I can change her heart rate, her breathing and her metabolism.”
“There is a biological basis for her feelings. The same region in the brain which allows us to use language, also regulates your body. That’s just there in the anatomy.”
Speaking in the Munk Dialogues on February 3rd, Feldman Barrett wants you to think differently about how you think. The Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University is among the top 1% of scientists cited worldwide, so she must be challenging a lot of thinking out there.
“People’s words have a direct effect on your brain activity and your bodily systems, and your words would have the same effect on other people,” she writes in her latest book, 7 1/2 Lessons About the Brain.
This is as close to a fact that scientists are willing to go. We may think we have independent rights and freedoms, but we actually have a socially dependent nervous system.
“Children who experience adversity are more prone to metabolic illnesses in adulthood. Verbal bullying. Calling names. Verbal aggression over a period of time can have similar physiological causes as physical violence.”
Feldman Barrett was astonished when she read the data on this, but the science is clear and irrefutable. “Ongoing verbal aggression over a “long” period of time may contribute to chronic stress and harm the brain, while occasional stress, like exercise, can benefit your nervous system.”
We can do physical harm to one another with our words. Our words can also soothe, support, and heal people. “What kind of person do you want to be?” she asked, “Do you want to add a metabolic load to somebody else?”
As communicators, this may be the most important lesson that we take to heart. We have a duty of care to one another. Words create metabolic responses.
What about free speech? Does this mean we have to censor ourselves or one another?
No. But it does mean that our freedom to express ourselves comes with incredible responsibility. We must realize that our words have the power to wound. We influence each other’s nervous systems in ways we are completely unaware of.
This basic understanding leads to an entire range of subsequent considerations.
In Feldman Barrett’s lab, rafts of scientists toil away to uncover how the brain constructs our experiences and generates our actions as the supercomputer that regulates our bodies for maximum efficiency. It is an evolutionary biology approach to neuroscience.
The brain’s main job is to coordinate the systems of the body, to maximize metabolic efficiency through energy regulation. This is a wholistic approach to brain research. The parts of the brain that are responsible for language, decision-making and motivation also regulate all the basic bodily functions that are important to the physiological things we do and experience.
The brain becomes wired throughout infancy to create a model of the world which helps it predict what could happen. “Your brain is wired to initiate actions before you’re aware of them.” she writes.
We construct reality in our brain, so we can predict things before they happen. As Wayne Gretsky famously said, “Skate to where the puck is going to be.” If we couldn’t predict, we couldn‘t play sports, the stock market, the casino or even take a chance on falling in love.
When the brain can’t predict, there is uncertainty. We must guess. And uncertainty is an expensive condition for the brain. The brain must create a new model. That’s called “learning.” You are updating your predictive model.
Learning is based on “statistical regularity.” If it happened many times, it would probably happen again. But what happens when we predict incorrectly based on the model of the world that we have built? When we get it wrong, what catastrophic circumstances can result?
Feldman Barrett was motivated to write her first book, How Emotions Are Made, when she learned that women over 65 were dying of heart attacks because doctors were guessing that the patients suffered from anxiety and were sent home. These patients just didn’t fit the doctors’ predictive disease model.
Promotion of uncertainty is the job of an educator, a manager, a team leader. But you need to support the person in their learning, in creating a new model. You need to give them an opportunity to replenish, or the continued uncertainty will cause anxiety, even depression – metabolic illnesses to Feldman Barrett’s way of thinking. We see this in business environments much too often.
As educational communicators, our job is to create a level of uncertainly that compels an inquiry. But we must also support the process. Some years ago, we held a workshop where educators and public utility employees worked together in groups to make an electrical circuit with one wire. They tried, failed, got exasperated, supported one another, and tried again. Until they got it. Then they shouted for joy. Had they not faced their challenges they would not have learned in a way that was memorable, in way that caused them to create a new model of understanding the world. And in so doing, they saw one another differently.
As they shared a new experience where they took risks, showed their vulnerability, and triumphed, they formed a common bond. They became neighbours, citizens of each other’s world.
This kind of discomfort is not to be avoided; it must be supported. After all, that’s how we learn.
Feldman Barrett believes the societal uncertainty caused by the pandemic, political tribalism and economic stress is in fact causing a public health crisis. It is a contributing factor to a range of metabolic diseases: heart disease, diabetes, and depression.
And the words we say to each other contribute to this uncertainty and contribute to our metabolic health or ill health.
Today’s headline appearing on the phone demonstrates this perfectly. When a yoga studio tried to maintain a COVID vaccine passport, the co-owner was so harassed by a barrage of anti-vaxxers’ invective that he dropped the requirement as soon as possible, even though his clients liked the security of the passport.
Quite simply, a yoga instructor was being made sick by the angry words of harassers. This is now our world.
So now that we know that sticks and stones can break our bones, and words will also hurt us - how do we protect ourselves?
The heart is a muscle; it needs exercise. So does the brain.
“When you try, really try, to embody somebody else’s point of view,” Feldman Barrett says, “you can change your future predictions about the people who hold those different points of view.”
Feldman Barrett cites the example of her volunteering, in the last American election, to go on phone duty, calling people whom she knew disagreed with her. The more she did this, the more she was able to build resiliency, to exercise her predictive ability about these folks. It was not meant to persuade other people to change their minds, but it did help Feldman Barrett readjust her model of the world. It reduced her uncertainty and her metabolic load.
We think we are so rational. And that rationality is the absence of feeling. Not at all. The absence of feeling is not possible, according to Feldman Barrett. Which is why we become so dug-in with our points of view.
Engaging with people can be an unpleasant experience. This increase in unpleasantness goes against our natural need to gravitate to similarity. We like to be comfortable with the world and the people we know. The unpleasantness dysregulates the body. But an unpleasant situation can help us learn better.
“Engaging with ideas that are different from your own,” says Feldman Barrett, “is the price you pay for democracy.”
There is a stress in preparing your body for a major metabolic outlay because it can’t predict with certainty. So, our tribalized society causes a metabolic toll that adds up to predispose you to an illness. It has metabolic costs: people are fatigued, lethargic, apathetic, not learning as well, avoiding people. There is tremendous uncertainty when we are not predicting our world and our bodily effectively.
But there is a way out. And it’s up to us. Mindfully engaging with people who disagree with you is exercise for your brain, as long as you replenish – and don’t get locked into some kind of permanent echo-chamber where the moorings come loose.
“Social reality is a superpower,” says Feldman Barrett, “that emerges from an ensemble of human brains. It gives us the possibility to chart our own destiny and even influence the evolution of our species.”
We can be what we agree to be. White supremacists or an inclusive society? It’s our choice. The social reality we uphold is the “cultural inheritance” that we all agree exists… and magically, it exists! We see this as our collective narrative – a story we share.
With three little words, we can re-write the story. We can create a different social reality. This is a source of power and peril. The challenge comes when physical reality collides with social reality – over 6 million people dead from COVID vs. COVID doesn’t exist. It does. We cannot wish it away. But we can create a social reality based on the physical facts. Let’s protect ourselves and help one other.
Every time we experience conflict, uncertainty, and unpleasantness, we have an opportunity to adjust our model of the world. We can learn. This is the story of our lives. We face obstacles and we find ways to engage with them, causing us to experience a change.
Words can cause physiological harm. We have a responsibility for our language.
Thinking differently about how we think can help us create a better world for ourselves. But it is a challenge. We can use the “uncertainty” of a new experience to create a new model, and a new story. Learning and storytelling are fused together; they are discomforting, but they can result in a new social reality.
If our current story is not working, let’s create one that does. Let’s use the uncertainty to learn and create a new predictive model that better serves us all. That is the foundation of our work. Our thanks to Lisa Feldman Barrett for creating the discomforting conditions we needed to learn about it.
Lisa Feldman Barrett’s Munk Dialogue can be found at: https://munkdebates.com/dialogues/lisa-barrett