• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1073 0

more pervasive than you might think. You may have had the experience of watching a particularly riveting movie and then, afterward, talking like one of the characters you have just seen. Several people tell me that after reading a book with a distinctive writing style they find themselves writing and talking using that same style over the next few hours or even days. In fact, if I, like, started—you know—writing in a Valley girl style for like gobs of paragraphs, and, you know, if, uhhh, your phone rang and like you totally answered it? You would like majorly start talking like this.

I’ll stop now to preserve our respective senses of dignity.

LANGUAGE STYLE MATCHING AND THE BRAIN

If style matching is so pervasive, why does it occur? One explanation is that it is hardwired in our brains. In the 1980s, a team of Italian neuroscientists measured the activity of a group of brain cells in a macaque monkey that fired whenever the monkey grasped a particular object. Later, they discovered that the same group of cells fired when the monkey watched a person’s hand grasp the same object in the same way. Other studies suggested that there might be an entire group of brain cells that mirrors the actions of others. These groups of cells are collectively called mirror neurons or mirror neuron systems.

More recent studies have asked ballet dancers to watch videos of ballets while their brain activity was being scanned. The researchers found that mirror neuron systems became activated for ballet dancers while watching the ballet videos, whereas nondancers did not show the same activity. Most of us have had subjectively similar experiences. For example, if you have ever played tennis, you may have noticed that if you watch an intense match on television, you sometimes catch yourself subtly moving your arm in an attempt to hit the ball.

Particularly noteworthy is that most researchers report that mirror neurons are most dense in Broca’s area in the brain. You will recall from chapter 2 that Broca’s area is also the area implicated in the processing of function words. It’s not coincidental that the ability to use function words is closely linked to mimicking nonverbal behaviors and, according to recent findings, voice intonation and inflection. Indeed, many scholars now claim that the ability to mimic social behavior and its close links to Broca’s area explain the early development and evolution of language abilities.

The mirror neuron research is now relying on state-of-the-art brain imaging methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), where it is possible to see which parts of the brain are active during highly specific tasks. For example, a research team from Princeton University recently found that people who are particularly empathic show more brain activity in Broca’s area while watching short videos of people making emotional facial expressions than do people low in empathy. It should be emphasized that the mirror neuron research is still in its infancy with researchers often disagreeing about the best way to interpret the brain activity associated with empathy.

A question that emerges from the brain imaging research concerns the possible links between mirror neurons and language style matching. At this point, direct experiments have not been done. However, the studies we have conducted with style matching among students answering open-ended essay questions hint at some important parallels. Those students who evidenced the greatest style matching in response to the different question writing styles tended to be people who made the highest grades on the multiple choice exams. In other words, those students who were most committed to the class naturally paid closer attention to the essay questions. Paying closer attention resulted in greater correspondence between the function words in the questions and their responses.

We all have mirror neurons and have the basic ability to mimic and empathize with others. These abilities differ from person to person and also depend on whom we are talking with. We have