That Neuroscience Guy - The Neuroscience of Small Talk

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

How about this weather? The game was crazy last night! We often find ourselves repeating conversations like this with a wide range of people, it's what we call small talk. Today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy discusses the neuroscience behind small talk. 

Hi, my name is Olof Kergolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. Well, first, I apologize for being a few days late. I just got back from New Zealand, and I guess the only way you could put it is that my vacation got in the way of the podcast a little bit and had some trouble recording while the last few days I was down there. So my apologies, but we're back and rolling with only a couple episodes left in season three. Now for today, we all do it. We all make small talk and have meaningless conversation. In fact, a lot of us do it all the time. You know, those generic conversations you have with people like, hey, how's your day going? You know, the weather's really nice, isn't it? These kind of things.

conversations with people at the grocery store while I'm out walking all the time. But why do we do it? What drives us within the brain to have these little random meaningless conversations and make small talk? Well, there's a whole bunch of reasons, and I'm going to take you through it and tell you the neuroscience of small talk and meaningless conversations. People are social creatures. That's the primary driving reason for small talk in these conversations. We are driven naturally to want to interact with others. Well, at least most of us. There is a small subset of the population that prefers being alone. But for the vast majority of the people on this planet, we are social and we want to interact. In fact, you might have experienced this even more with the COVID pandemic. I know I did. I was home alone for a lot of it and

I would talk with anyone I could find that would listen when I was out and about for my trips to the grocery store, my daily walk. And what drove me to do it and what potentially drove you to do it? We are social creatures. Now, what's going on in the brain though? Well, based on the stuff we've talked about the past couple of seasons, you'd probably guess the amygdala and you're right. Remember the amygdala is that emotional part of your brain. It's attached on either side to the front of the hippocampus and it's where we have our emotional responses. And when we interact with other people, we typically have a positive emotional response. And that drives the amygdala to tell the brain, well, hey, let's keep doing that. So at the center of this is the amygdala

and the emotional systems in our brain that respond positively to these kind of conversations and interactions. And of course, there can be negative responses as well. If someone says mean to you, you actually have a change in activity in the amygdala as well. But in general, it's the positive aspect of that emotional response that's driving us to interact with others. But there's more to it than that. When you have these conversations with other people and make small talk, you're also boosting the production of hormones and neurotransmitters and these things stimulate the body systems and nerve pathways. They're basically changing our internal chemistry and not even just for a moment, but perhaps for a lifetime. Repeated social

interaction causes the release of hormones and neurotransmitters to increase overall. So the social interaction, we're actually hardwired to respond positively, just like we do with the amygdala. Now, in other words, as we communicate, our brain triggers this cocktail of neurotransmitters and hormones, and that can make us feel good or bad depending on the type interaction. But let's just focus on the positive reasons for small talk and the good conversations. And we translate that inner experience into words, sentences, and stories. So this sort of drives what we're saying in a sense. And these feel-good conversations that

we have, they trigger higher levels of dopamine, which we've talked about in the past. If you remember, dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays a massive role in reinforcement learning and reinforcing behaviors, and as we'll talk about in future episodes, even addiction. And also the release of oxytocin, endorphins, and other biochemicals that give us a sense of well-being. So as we're having these conversations with people, the amygdala is firing, but we're also having this massive release of neurotransmitters and hormones that have a positive effect and make us want to do more of it. So basically we engage in small talk because it makes us feel good. Our brain responds to it positively, but there's even more to it. us feel good. Our brain responds to it positively. But there's even more to it. It's a bit of a strategy. We have a lot of low-level drives that it carries over from a long time ago. The fight

or flight response, for instance. All right. But we also have a desire to reproduce. At some fundamental level, we're hardwired to interact with other people because reproducing and being part of a community is a positive thing. And this drives us to have small talk in these conversations, even if that's not your intent. Even if you're happily in a relationship with someone else, those low-level drives are still there and they're kind of hardwired. So that's another factor that's driving us this way. factor that's driving us this way. And last but not least, our prefrontal cortex is aware of this. So it takes on that role. Our prefrontal cortex is sitting up there and processing, hey, you know, all of the signs I'm getting from the brain is that we're a bit lonely.

So maybe we should interact with people. And that ties to all of that responses I've talked about, the hormones, the neurotransmitters, and the amygdala. Now, it's not just small talks. While I was getting ready for this episode, I was reading about the neuroscience of conversations. And I found a really cool study from 2021, where they found that people actually prefer deeper conversations over small talk with strangers. Now, how do they do that? Basically, the researchers in question conducted 12 experiments over a pretty long period of time, and they tested over 1800 people. And in each of these experiments, people were told to basically discuss deep or shallow topics with a stranger. So they were instructed whether they should have a deep

conversation or just have some small talk. Deep topics included things like, can you describe a time when you cried in front of another person? While the shallow questions were shallow, what do you think about the weather today? Now, prior to each conversation, people were asked to rate how awkward they thought the conversation would be, how connected they would feel with their conversation partner, and how much they would enjoy talking. So they gave these ratings in advance of having the conversation. And then, of course, they rated the same metrics afterwards. All the researchers found that both types of conversation were less awkward than expected.

They led to more connectedness than expected. And the enjoyment was more than expected. But it was especially true for deep conversations. People really enjoyed having deep conversations with random strangers. And people tended to overestimate the awkwardness of these conversations. So finally enough, as much as we enjoy engaging in small talk and meaningless conversations, we also have this really strong brain response to have deep conversations with people. Now, finally, as an add-on, I thought I'd talk a little bit about

why do we forget so many of these conversations? You know, you go to the grocery store, you have a conversation with someone you just met while you were buying your vegetables, and, you know, half an hour later, you realize you don't even really remember what you said to them. Well, I've talked about attention in the past, so I won't spend long on it, but this is what we call the attentional spotlight. So attention works in a couple of different ways, but what's relevant here is imagine a spotlight coming out from the front

of your head. And the parietal cortex focuses the spotlight. You're looking around the world and you're going, what should I focus on? And when you're talking to someone else, generally your spotlight is on that person. But remember the scenario I gave you. You're in the grocery store, you're getting your vegetables, there's other people walking around. That spotlight probably moves around quite a bit while you're talking. And we've all experienced this. That's that bit where someone's literally talking to you and all of a sudden you realize you were thinking about someone else. Well, while you were thinking about someone else, guess where the spotlight was?

It was there. And what that literally means is what we call sensory gating. So the whole point of the attentional system is to help the brain decide what information comes in. Because there's constantly a ton of information in the world around us. If you processed everything at a deep level, the brain would get a little bit overloaded. So the spotlight helps us by basically saying, let's let through this small bit of information and let's just ignore everything else. So one of the reasons you forget those small and meaningless conversations is the spotlight. And when it moves away when you don't really want it to,

or perhaps that small and meaningless conversation wasn't as interesting as you thought it would be. Well, I hope you enjoyed this little bit of small talk about small talk. And I'm glad to be back in Canada and able to record our podcast back on time. And of course, remember, please subscribe and thank you so much to everyone that's listening to the podcast. If you have ideas, we've got four more episodes or three more episodes left in season three, then we'll be taking a break for August, but then we'll be back in September. If you've got ideas about what you want to know about the neuroscience of daily life, please send me a DM. You can email me,

thatneuroscienceguy at gmail.com, or you can follow me on Twitter at thatneuroscienceguy and just DM me directly. We've already got about 10 ideas down, but we want a massive list so we can scroll through and see what we've talked about, what we haven't, and what we think would be really interesting. And of course, thanks to everyone supporting us on Patreon. Remember, every little bit of money you can donate helps the podcast a ton. All of the money goes to graduate students in the Kregolson Lab. And finally, of course, we've got those t-shirts up on our Etsy store. Feel free to buy one. They're kind of fun. We're going to try to get a couple extra designs out over the rest of the summer, and all that money again goes to the graduate students. My name is Olof Kregolson, and I'm that neuroscience guy. Thanks so much

for listening, and I'll see you on Wednesday for another Neuroscience Bite.