The Science of Talking: Boost Your Mood, Sharpen Your Mind, and Protect Against Dementia | Maryellen MacDonald
4/13/202658 min
The way you talk to other people (and yourself) can reduce dysregulation and distraction--and lead to better decisions.
Maryellen MacDonald is the Donald P. Hayes Professor (emerit) of Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Wisconsin−Madison. She is a cognitive scientist with a focus on psycholinguistics, the study of how we comprehend, produce, and learn languages. Her latest book is More Than Words: How Talking Sharpens the Mind and Shapes Our World.
In this episode we talk about:
- The hidden benefits of talking, including self-talk and writing
- How talking helps focus attention and clarify your thinking
- Why talking can help regulate emotions and improve decision-making
- Why talking is actually harder than listening
- Why we shouldn't rush to finish other people's sentences
- How deliberate talking can help protect against dementia
- Why understanding something doesn't necessarily mean you've learned it
- How talking about new information helps your brain remember it
- Why explaining things to other people deepens your own learning
- Why kids need chances to talk and not just watch screens
- Why you shouldn't judge people by how they talk
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDan Harris· Host0:00
[upbeat music] This is the Ten Percent Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. [upbeat music] Hello, everybody. How we doing? Today, I'm talking to a cognitive scientist about how to harness something we all do every day: talking. We're gonna cover how to use talking in order to prevent distraction, depression, dysregulation, dementia, and much more. Just to be clear from the jump here, and I already made a nod to this, but I wanna make it super clear, my guest is defining talking in a broad way, not just having conversations with other people, but also having conversations with yourself. In other words, self-talk, and also writing to yourself, which is another kind of self-talk. So again, she's defining talking broadly. The she in question is Maryellen MacDonald. She is the Donald P. Hayes Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She's a cognitive scientist with a focus on, uh, psycholinguistics, which is the study of how we comprehend, produce, and learn languages. She's also written a book, which is called More Than Words. In this conversation, we talk about the hidden benefits of talking, including, as I mentioned earlier, both self-talk and writing, how talking helps focus attention and clarify your thinking, why talking can help regulate your emotions and improve your decision-making,