The famous scene: In Jerry Maguire , Renée Zellweger tells Tom Cruise, “You had me at ‘Hello.’” According to researchers at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, “Multiple experiments have shown that the brain is able to anticipate the information it will hear and know exactly what the speaker is going to talk about.”* So, why did Cameron Crowe, the director, give Cruise, playing Maguire, the long apology to offer Zellweger’s Dorothy?
Zellweger’s line might be as famous as any spoken by one of Shakespeare’s characters. It’s been used as a name for a pressed powder shadow palette that sells for $18.00, as lyrics in a song by Kenny Chesney, as the title of a book by Mhairi McFarlane, as a point of departure for discussions on websites and in pick-up bars, and, gosh, the expression is ubiquitous.
So, do I need to write anything else here? Your predictive brain already knows what I’m going to say.
BIG GAP ON PAGE WHILE READER THINKS… AND PREDICTS…
Okay, I had you at the title. Having already heard the expression from the movie in its many forms, you established a context of possible meanings. No, I know it’s not the same stuff as the BCCBL’s study that covered the spoken word and the ability of people to predict actual phonemes. The written word is a bit different—but not much. What the BCCBL discovered we can extrapolate to mean we are easily bored by most speakers because we already know the context of the talk (lecture, speech, address, sermon) and have heard variations seemingly ad infinitum. What could possibly be new in the saying?
This is where you come in. You can actually increase your predictive power. Meditation does the trick. Your predictive abilities won’t increase overnight, but they will increase as you become more self-aware. I’m serious. Try it for a couple of minutes each day and get back to me in a month.**
I know, you want a guarantee before you commit to daily meditation. I can’t offer one, and if I did, it wouldn’t be more valid than that offered by the serial killer in There’s Something about Mary, when, in offering a product for six-minute abs to compete with “8-minute abs,” he says that if the buyers aren’t satisfied, he’ll send them two more minutes.
Those BCCBL researchers from San Sebastian used magnetoencephalography to record brain activity. As Nicola Molinaro, one of the researchers says, “The brain is always trying to estimate what the future will be like….” And this isn’t just blind guesswork. Your brain’s auditory region isn’t just a passive receiver waiting for a stimulus. It’s not just an ear attached to the side of the head waiting for sounds. It predicts. The brain “knows exactly what the physical form of the word it is going to hear will be like, even before it is pronounced.” And this predictive activity began as much as a second before hearing the auditory stimulus. “We have found clear evidence that the neuronal system can predict the form of a word before it appears….”
Even if you choose never to meditate to sharpen your predictive power, you can’t stop yourself from being exposed to all the ways people behave and speak. You sharpen that predictive power daily. Maybe you don’t like that ability and don’t want it sharpened. After all, knowing the future invites boredom when it arrives. Knowing what the preacher is about to preach is a surefire way to drowsy eyes and nodding head.
Nevertheless, in your conversations today, pay attention to your predictive power. ***
*Online report at Medical press https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-09-brain-words-pronounced.htmlScientific Reports (2018) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-27898-w , Provided by Plataforma SINC.
**See the short video on meditation by Dr. Christian Conte at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhroD8WPT6s&t=49s
***Need a topic for your neurological research? Try using magnetoencephalography to determine whether or not the same part of the brain that predicts words also predicts the next musical phrase in a song someone hears for the first time. Think about it. Based on one's knowledge of notes that usually come in sequence and harmonic and complementary sounds, almost everyone can sing along with others as they voice a new song. Why is it that audiences know when that final note is about to sound at the end of a symphony or at the end of a popular tune they hear for the first time?
Zellweger’s line might be as famous as any spoken by one of Shakespeare’s characters. It’s been used as a name for a pressed powder shadow palette that sells for $18.00, as lyrics in a song by Kenny Chesney, as the title of a book by Mhairi McFarlane, as a point of departure for discussions on websites and in pick-up bars, and, gosh, the expression is ubiquitous.
So, do I need to write anything else here? Your predictive brain already knows what I’m going to say.
BIG GAP ON PAGE WHILE READER THINKS… AND PREDICTS…
Okay, I had you at the title. Having already heard the expression from the movie in its many forms, you established a context of possible meanings. No, I know it’s not the same stuff as the BCCBL’s study that covered the spoken word and the ability of people to predict actual phonemes. The written word is a bit different—but not much. What the BCCBL discovered we can extrapolate to mean we are easily bored by most speakers because we already know the context of the talk (lecture, speech, address, sermon) and have heard variations seemingly ad infinitum. What could possibly be new in the saying?
This is where you come in. You can actually increase your predictive power. Meditation does the trick. Your predictive abilities won’t increase overnight, but they will increase as you become more self-aware. I’m serious. Try it for a couple of minutes each day and get back to me in a month.**
I know, you want a guarantee before you commit to daily meditation. I can’t offer one, and if I did, it wouldn’t be more valid than that offered by the serial killer in There’s Something about Mary, when, in offering a product for six-minute abs to compete with “8-minute abs,” he says that if the buyers aren’t satisfied, he’ll send them two more minutes.
Those BCCBL researchers from San Sebastian used magnetoencephalography to record brain activity. As Nicola Molinaro, one of the researchers says, “The brain is always trying to estimate what the future will be like….” And this isn’t just blind guesswork. Your brain’s auditory region isn’t just a passive receiver waiting for a stimulus. It’s not just an ear attached to the side of the head waiting for sounds. It predicts. The brain “knows exactly what the physical form of the word it is going to hear will be like, even before it is pronounced.” And this predictive activity began as much as a second before hearing the auditory stimulus. “We have found clear evidence that the neuronal system can predict the form of a word before it appears….”
Even if you choose never to meditate to sharpen your predictive power, you can’t stop yourself from being exposed to all the ways people behave and speak. You sharpen that predictive power daily. Maybe you don’t like that ability and don’t want it sharpened. After all, knowing the future invites boredom when it arrives. Knowing what the preacher is about to preach is a surefire way to drowsy eyes and nodding head.
Nevertheless, in your conversations today, pay attention to your predictive power. ***
*Online report at Medical press https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-09-brain-words-pronounced.htmlScientific Reports (2018) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-27898-w , Provided by Plataforma SINC.
**See the short video on meditation by Dr. Christian Conte at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhroD8WPT6s&t=49s
***Need a topic for your neurological research? Try using magnetoencephalography to determine whether or not the same part of the brain that predicts words also predicts the next musical phrase in a song someone hears for the first time. Think about it. Based on one's knowledge of notes that usually come in sequence and harmonic and complementary sounds, almost everyone can sing along with others as they voice a new song. Why is it that audiences know when that final note is about to sound at the end of a symphony or at the end of a popular tune they hear for the first time?
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