Good Life Project - To Read Emotion, Don't Look, Listen.

Episode Date: October 12, 2017

As the world goes digital, we yearn for more tactile experiences. And, in our Good Life Science news, if you want to be a human emotion detector, don't look...listen.Good Life Riff: As the world has gone digital, we feel pain. Sure, there are benefits to an electronic existence, but truth is, we are wired to experience life in a more tactile, touch-driven way. Pinching, sliding and tapping screens doesn't cut it. We need to touch, create, make and build with our hands, bodies and tools, working with materials in three-dimension. Right now, that need is going largely unfilled. But, there's a counter-movement afoot to take that back. We call it The Touch Economy. That's what we're exploring in today's GLP Riff.Good Life Science: And, in our Good Life Science segment, we're diving into some fascinating new research on how we pick up on the emotions of those around us. For years, the emphasis on been on seeing faces, decoding expressions and micro-expressions. Turns out, new research shows our ears may be a much better tool for understanding what's really going on inside the heads of those around us. That's what we're talking about in today's GLP Science Update. And, as always, for those want to go to the source, here's a link to the full study.Rockstar Sponsors: RXBAR Kids is a snack bar made with high-quality, real ingredients designed specifically for kids. It contains 7 grams of protein and has zero added sugar and no gluten, soy or dairy. Find at Target stores OR for 25% off your first order, visit RXBAR.com/goodlife.Are you hiring? Do you know where to post your job to find the best candidates? Unlike other job sites, ZipRecruiter doesn’t depend on candidates finding you; it finds them. And right now, GLP listeners can post jobs on ZipRecruiter for FREE, That’s right. FREE! Just go to ZipRecruiter.com/good.MVMT Watches (pronounced Movement) was founded on the belief that style shouldn’t break the bank. Classic design, quality construction and styled minimalism. Get 15% off today —WITH FREE SHIPPING and FREE RETURNS—by going to MVMT.com/good.Audible has the best audiobook performances, the largest library, and the most exclusive content. Learn more, start your 30-day trial and get your first Audible book free, go to Audible.com/goodlife.Support for this podcast comes from abc, presenting “Kevin Probably Saves the World”, the new drama that will change the way you feel…about the Universe. New episodes every Tuesday at 10/9 Central on abc. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, fantastic, awesome humans. It's Jonathan Fields coming to you with today's Good Life Project update, where we blend a couple of different segments together, generally a riff and a good life science update, which is what we've got on tap for you today. In our riff, I'll be talking about something that I call the touch economy. I have no idea if that phrase has ever been used before, but it's just kind of the phrase that I use to describe our intrinsic need to be tactile in the world. And it's something that I think we're coming back to. We're also diving into some pretty fascinating research, and that is research about how listening versus seeing actually allows us to pick up emotion. Really excited to share these riffs

and science updates with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. And we're back with today's riff. I want to talk to you about this thing that I call the touch economy. And this has been on my mind for years now. We see so much of the world moving into the space of being digital. You know, it's funny, I was, we were, we were out of the city the other weekend, and we're hanging out at a coffee shop. And on a table in the coffee shop, there was this old rotary phone and I'm hanging out with, it was me, my wife and my 16 year old daughter. And we look at the phone and we're kind of trying

to describe how the phone worked to my daughter, which is like this kind of foreign, bizarre thing. And it becomes pretty clear that there's a dial and you put your finger in the little hole and you spin it around and there are little kind of tap, tap, tap clicks that happen. And for those of you who are a similar age as I am, I'm 51 or somewhere in the range or who are exposed to rotary phones, you may have when you were a kid hit a point where a parent may have gotten a little bothered by the amount of phone calls, taking up the one phone in the house and put a classic phone lock, which was like a little nub that stuck out so you couldn't rotate the dial.

And then you learn that if you tapped the little thing that sat under the handset, you could click off the numbers of a telephone number and secretly call your friends and bypass that high level gadgetry that was designed to stop you from calling. The bigger point being, we grew up, many of us, in a world that was highly tactile. And now we live and we exist in a world that is highly digital. And part of the digital experience is we're taking touch away. We're taking the making process away. We're taking the feeling process away. We're taking the making process away. We're taking the feeling process away. So that has a lot

of amazing benefits to it. It has like incredible productivity and efficiency benefits. It allows us power that we've never had before. It allows us to connect, you know, in ways that we've never been able to connect. The digital world is incredible and it is a gift in our lives. And at the same time, I feel that it is creating a deep and profound chasm. It's creating a year digital. Our bodies have not progressed. Our brains and our yearning and reward systems have changed. So yes, they're triggered by digital things and sometimes a very manipulative and almost addictive way. But we've been wired for generations and generations to want to experience touch and physicality

in a way that's going away. And I truly believe that we are feeling the pain of not having that in our lives. And in fact, you're seeing a lot of social phenomenon start to back that up. So I see the pendulum has slung far out into the non-tactile, non-touch digital realm. But I also feel like it's starting to swing back into the touching people, touching stuff, touching things and process, the actual physical tactile realm

because our brains need it. We yearn for it. So when I think about making things, for example, I love to make things. And I grew up making things with my hands. I was an artist. I was a painter. I built things constantly. I earned my way through high school painting album covers on jean jackets. I earned my way through college painting houses and working on construction crew, doing home renovations in the summers, hard work, physical work. And I loved it. I loved the fact that you could touch and feel and make and craft and hone and then step back and see a physical thing and say to yourself, with my own hands and heart and mind, I built this.

And we yearn for that. So when I look now at the world of design, I think, well, okay, so I want to make some posters or something like that, or I want to print some cool stuff. Well, I have two printers in my home, and I can design stuff on a design app on my computer and print it out either on a black and white thing or on a color thing and have it ready and looking pretty in about three to five seconds. to go and learn how to use 1950s letterpress machines in a small shop in a corner of Brooklyn where it takes a long time, it's dirty, it's labor intensive, but it's gorgeous and so much

more rewarding than hitting a button on my computer and seeing a page pop out of my printer. There's something about the physical process of making, of using your hands and your brain and your physical body to feel and touch and create something. And then when I run the paper out of this letterpress machine after I've taken a big crank and spun it so it rolls things between rollers and blocks and letters. And I pull a piece of paper out of the press. And then I run my hands over the paper and I can feel the indentations and the impressions of all the different things that now pressed the ink into the paper, there's something that is so glorious and sensual and just viscerally, tactilely delicious about it. And I think we yearn for that. I feel like as much as we are going digital, we want

that thing. And I'm realizing that it's not just me who's feeling it because the maker movement in this country right now, the crafter movement in this country, the artisanal movement with seasonal movement, with everything from art to food, these things are exploding. They're the things that take way more physical effort, way more time, and have you in there touching, feeling, tactilely involved in the process of experience and creation. These things are not exploding because they're easier. They're exploding because we want that level of touch. We need it. We yearn for it. This is the basis of this emerging touch economy, which is funny because this is the way the economy used to be. And the pendulum swung all the way digital. And now I see it swinging back in a really powerful way to the idea of tactile touch, physical making.

And I think it's a great thing because we yearn for that. So if you haven't yet involved yourself in any way, shape, or form, if you're walking around, if you're a maker, a creator, in any way, shape, or form, if you're walking around, if you're a maker, a creator in any way, shape or form, if you love to see things arise out of nothing or bring two things together, make a third, and you've been doing it almost entirely in the digital realm, I would make this invitation. Find a way, take a workshop, find a place where you can actually start to touch and feel and use physical creation as a mode of making an expression and do it as a workshop. Do it in your own home, buy a kit online, whatever it may be. Try it once. Set aside some time because it will take you a lot longer than if you do it the fast, efficient, digital way. And just turn on a little music and smile into it.

I can pretty much guarantee you it's going to light up the reward centers in your brain in a very different way. And you may just feel a reconnection to something that you have been missing for a really long time in your life. I know for me, it's become a really big difference maker. And I really look forward to doing more and more of it. That's what I'm thinking about re-accessing the touch economy. Dive into it, check it out. And really excited to share today's science update with you all about listening and emotion. Play ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot.

Flight risk. And today's Good Life Science update is all about how we perceive emotion. There's been this mythology for a long time that our critical sense, probably the most critical sense when we're trying to pick up the emotion of other people, is sight. So you may have seen all the different sort of like micro expressions in people's faces. And there's been a lot of emphasis in trying to decode somebody's emotion by being able to pick up both the big major expressions, which are usually pretty easy to hit and see with a big giant smile, but then also looking for the micro expressions, the tiny little flashes or the tiny little pieces of

those expressions, where if we can see them, we can tell what the expression is. And we can also tell whether it's real or it's fake. So a lot of emphasis on our ability to detect how somebody else's feeling has been based on our ability to see their faces and then interpret what the emotion is. Which is kind of interesting because this new study now by Michael Krauss, which is published in American Psychologist, and as always for fellow science geeks, we will link to the actual study report for you. It's come out and they did a really interesting experiment, which looks at using visual, using audio, or using both as a way to try and detect emotion. And they were actually able to come up with a pretty surprising conclusion.

And it also validates something that I've heard about radio and podcasting for a really long time. So here's what they did. In the experiment, somewhere around 1,700, close to 1,800 people were pushed through the experiment. And they were exposed to a couple of different social scenarios, either interaction with an individual or they would observe interactions with two other individuals. Now, there were sort of three modes or three ways that they could use their senses. One, they could only see the other person sort of speaking and emoting. They could, in a second setup for this experiment, they could only hear the conversations, but they couldn't actually see the people's faces.

In the third version of this, they could do both. They could actually see and hear both. So they could pick up cues both visually and auditorily. offering here, which is the audio of a conversation was stripped out and read through a computer device, which essentially removed all tonality and emotion. And in the experiments, the people who were observing these conversations were asked to identify the emotions. Now, you would think, based on probably what we've been told for a long time, that the group that was able to see the people's faces would actually be able to most accurately detect the emotions underlying the people who are speaking, the people in the conversation. And in fact, that was not the case. So what happened was that the people who were exposed only to voice communication were able to actually decode

or figure out the emotions of the people in the conversations better than the people who either just saw the conversation, saw the people's faces. And here's the really surprising thing. Voice only was actually a better signal for emotion than voice plus visual. That means that if you could actually see and hear somebody and then try and tell me what was the emotion that was being conveyed, you would be able to do a better job of telling me the emotion if you actually couldn't see them and you could only hear them. And that's kind of an amazing thing. But interestingly, as somebody who spends a fair amount of time listening to and producing audio-only, listening-only content, that doesn't surprise me in any way, shape, or form.

One of the things that got me into producing audio, because in the beginning of Good Life Project, we were actually, the first two years, we were producing video. And we made the shift to move into audio only. And one of the things that that triggered that for me was a couple years back, I was I was walking around one of the museums in New York City, with a docent who also happened to be a mutual friend. And I was introduced because she also is sort of one of the original producers of a sort of a legendary public radio complex. And I told her at the time, I said, you know, I'm actually, I'm really interested in public radio. And she kind of looked at me and said, why? And I said, well, because, you know, there's huge reach.

She kind of looked at me a little bit weird, raised an eyebrow. And, you know, I realized I was missing something. And I was like, what am I missing? And she said, the really big thing about radio versus video, what you're doing now, is that audio is a profoundly more intimate medium. And as soon as she said that, I got it. Because when we hear a voice in our head or a conversation in our head, when we're listening only, it's actually not like we don't have a visual. We create the visual in our brains. nuance of voice and the nuance of audio and sound and sound design and sonic story, that we perceive it in a much deeper level. And the voice, and this is now validated by this study,

the voice conveys such a complex layer, nuanced offering of emotion, that it invokes sort of a deeper reaction. It allows us to connect on a deeper level. And in fact, in this study, one of the things that I'll sort of like read exact language that they shared is that voice only communication is particularly likely to enhance empathic accuracy through increasing focused attention on the linguistic and paralinguistic vocal uses that accompany speech. Meaning when it's voice only, our empathic centers become more triggered and we hear deeper levels of vocal cues coming from the person speaking. So really interesting for me as somebody who is involved in the world of creating conversation experience through voice only. And also, I think really interesting for us as human beings in really understanding that

it's not just the visual that tells us how somebody is feeling. It's the voice. And if you really want to understand what's happening with somebody and be in a position to really get the emotion that's being offered, maybe focus a bit more on what they're saying with your ears and really deeply listening rather than just trying to see what's going on. So fascinating research and really interesting for me again because I am in the world of producing voice only or audio only. We will, as always, link to that study report and be back next week with some more fun stuff in a new Good Life update.

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If the stories and ideas in any way moved you, I would so appreciate if you would take just a few extra seconds for two quick things. One, if it's touched you in some way, if there's some idea or moment in the story or in the conversation that you really feel like you would share with somebody else, that it would make a difference in somebody else's lives. Take a moment and whatever app you're using, just share this episode with somebody who you think it'll make a difference for. Email it if that's the easiest thing, whatever is easiest for you. And then, of course, if you're compelled, subscribe so that you can stay a part of this continuing experience.

My greatest hope with this podcast is not just to produce moments and share stories and ideas that impact one person listening, but to let it create a conversation, to let it serve as a catalyst for the elevation of all of us together collectively, because that's how we rise. When stories and ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change happens. And I would love to invite you to participate on that level. Thank you so much, as always, for your intention, for your attention, for your heart. And I wish you only the best. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Charge time and actual results will vary.