Communication is about so much more than sharing words. As neuroscientist Shane O’Mara explains, communication is about sharing reality.

According to O’Mara, “A conversation is where we create a shared reality together.” As a professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin, his research has focused on how human brains sync up through communication. “The essence is that we are creating a shared reality where we come to share the same states of emotion, the same states of memory, and we come to think about the future together in a new way.”

On this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, O’Mara joins host Matt Abrahams to discuss how language, memory, and imagination play into communication, and how we can use active listening, turn-taking, and mentalizing to create a shared reality together.

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For a full transcript of this conversation, visit our website.

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