Multitasking - You can’t talk to someone and check your phone!

I'll just point out that even with your brain's 100 billion neurons processing information at a rate of up to a thousand times per second, you simply cannot do two tasks at the same time effectively. That is according to Vanderbilt University neuroscientist Paul E. Dux of the University of Queensland in Australia.

A central bottleneck exists in the brain that prevents you from doing two things at once, they say. Their neurological evidence shows that it's caused by "the inability of the lateral frontal and prefrontal cortex and the superior fontal cortex to process two tasks at once."

Or more simply put, "Humans can barely attend to more than one stimulus at a time and have extreme difficulty undertaking multiple tasks concurrently," says Dux, based on work in his attention and control lab.

Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Body Language of the Republican Debates

Body Language of the Republican Debates

Historically the most charismatic (based on Power, likeability and Attractiveness)   in the pack of debaters is judged to have "won" the debate according to the viewers. We love a charismatic speaker. Charisma even without credibility can be extremely powerful. Researchers at the Institute for Social Research studied the effects of charisma on politics. In the study, Harvard undergraduates who were shown ten-second silent video clips of unfamiliar candidates from 58 past gubernatorial elections consistently chose the candidate who won. They didn’t hear a word the candidates said, but they almost without exception picked the winner. Their choices were made purely on the basis of body language. In fact, when they could hear what the candidates said, the students were no better at predicting who had won.

One of the aspects of the debates I found interesting is that no candidate in the later debates stood out as being tallest, the most attractive, powerful or likeable in other wards no one was highly charismatic. Compare that to the obvious most charismatic "winner" in the last two elections. 

It looked like they had the most intense lights aimed at Trump, to make him have that horrible squint that made him look like the Grinch. He looked mad at the start of every question. At the beginning of the debate he had the most energy and confidence, though the majority of the energy was anger and bravado. When Trump was asked about sending drug dealers across the borders he gave one of his pat nonverbal gesture clusters he raised his hands high in the air pushing them forward.

We typically raise our hands to communicate happiness joy, confidence and power. Open palms signal the receiver of the message that you are "unarmed" and likely to be safe and honest.

The forward pushing of the hands signals power and action. So the entire gesture cluster, though it is not spontaneous for him, sends a message of extreme power and action and a desire for you to view him as honest.

 Mark Rubio also started with high energy.

Chris Christie’s first answer was like a race horse fast and prepared out the box and his delivery appeared more sincere than canned.

Rand Paul looked like he had not had a good night's sleep in a week and his gestures were very odd and highly coached making him look like a puppet. Visually compared to other candidates he appeared smaller, rather like a little boy.  

John Kasich came across through the entire debates as the most level headed calm candidate, which is very interesting. He gestured honestly with feel show say.

Bush started out very off as if he was having trouble being in his body. He was tense. As he answered about his brothers war was a mistake, he was not sure of himself.   I feel he lost any chance of winning this debate with his lack of self-assurance and hesitating delivery on this question.

Later on 4 percent growth his delivery got better, but I think it was too late in the debates.

Governor Walker did answer specifically question about Kate's Law.

Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

You Had Me At Hello: The Science Behind First Impressions

May 05, 2014 3:39 AM ET

Michelle Trudeau

Humans make split-second judgments about others based on the way they talk.
Katherine Streeter for NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Katherine Streeter for NPR

Remember that famous line in the movie Jerry Maguire where Renee Zellweger says to Tom Cruise, "You had me at 'hello' "? Well it turns out there is some scientific evidence to back this up. People use voices to instantly judge people, researchers say.

"From the first word you hear a person speak, you start to form this impression of the person's personality, says Phil McAleer, a psychologist at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, who led the study.

In his experiment, McAleer recorded 64 people, men and women, from Glasgow, reading a paragraph that included the word "hello." He then extracted all the hellos and got 320 participants to listen to the different voices and rate them on 10 different personality traits, such as trustworthiness, aggressiveness, confidence, dominance and warmth.

What he found was that the participants largely agreed on which voice matched which personality trait. One male voice was overwhelmingly voted the least trustworthy, "the sort of guy you'd want to avoid," McAleer says. The pitch of the untrustworthy voice was much lower than the male deemed most trustworthy. McAleer says this is probably because a higher pitched male voice is closer to the natural pitch of a female, making the men sound less aggressive and friendlier than the lower male voices.

What makes females sound more trustworthy is whether their voices rise or fall at the end of the word, says McAleer. "Probably the trustworthy female, when she drops her voice at the end, is showing a degree of certainty and so can be trusted."

McAleer says it doesn't really matter whether the ratings of personality accurately reflect a speaker's true personality. What matters, he contends, is that there was so much agreement on the traits.

"What we find is that they all seem to perceive that one voice is the most trustworthy and another voice is the least trustworthy," he says. And the same is true of all the other personality traits that were tested.

In less than a second, the time it takes to say "hello," we make a snap judgment about someone's personality, says Jody Kreiman, a UCLA researcher who studies how we perceive voice. On hearing just a brief utterance, we decide whether to approach the person or to avoid them. Such rapid appraisals, she says, have a long evolutionary history. It's a brain process found in all mammals.

"Things that are important for behavior and for survival tend to happen pretty fast," Kreiman says.
"You don't have a huge amount of time. It has to be a simple system of communication."

And it doesn't get much simpler than a simple "hello," rapidly communicating friend or foe — a phenomenon that Phil McAleer has now dubbed "the Jerry Maguire effect." Underscoring the old adage that you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Actual link to the article:

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/05/05/308349318/you-had-me-at-hello-the-science-behind-first-impressions?utm_source=npr_email_a_friend&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140505&utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_term=


Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Movie, INSIDE OUT Reminds Us How to Train Your Brain to Manage Your Emotions

Recently, I wrote about the new Pixar Movie "Inside Out"  The film educates children on how their emotions effect them and how they can honor emotions in others.  And the article below my post shares how to train your brain to manage your emotions. First I wanted to share that there is one particular effective scene in the movie in which the character Sadness listens to the character Fear and helps him deal with his pain by mirroring his body language and reflecting his emotions.  Yes, a cartoon charterer used "Mirroring" and Reflective Listening."  A powerful message in the movie is that the emotion of sadness can be a important part of life and can actually move you to reflect on your life and make changes. I didn't begin to learn that until I was in college and my father passed away. How incredible for a small child to know that sadness does not make them bad, unlikable and less than.
Here is more advice about how manage your emotions.

Pixar's 'Inside Out' Reminds Us to Manage Emotions by Training Our Brain By Richard J. Davidson, Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry.

Posted: 07/24/2015 10:28 am EDT Updated: 07/24/2015 11:59 am EDT

If you could look at your own personality, which emotion leads others in managing your mind's control room? Joy? Fear? Disgust? Anger? Sadness?

Through the lens of the new Pixar movie "Inside Out", Joy calls the shots in the mind of the 11-year-old protagonist named Riley. In fact, this positive emotion -- personified by actress Amy Poehler -- finds it hard to step aside when other emotions are in many ways more appropriate for the situations Riley finds herself in, including moving to a new city and navigating school and friends.

The role emotions play in our lives has driven my research for 30 years and motivates the search for an answer to why some people seem more resilient than others to life's slings and arrows. What is it about the resilient group that helps them better overcome adversity?

To begin to answer this question, we've taken a look at how these emotions work in the brain in a laboratory setting with tools such as fMRI scanners. Over time, we've not only documented that people indeed have emotional styles and predispositions, but there are also techniques that show great promise in helping adults and children to alter their emotions to improve well-being and decrease suffering.

Thanks to neuroplasticity, perhaps the most influential idea in the past several decades in neuroscience, we know that the brain's structure and function can change throughout life, even as adults. It means you can train your brain to better manage which emotions surface when and for how long. So how do you move emotions like anger and sadness to the backseat to make room for more joy and to increase well-being?

Joy

There is growing neuroscientific understanding of joy and happiness, and one of the important things we've learned has to do with what might best be called "savoring" --- the capacity to savor a positive experience and to allow it to permeate your activities and give a positive glow to everyday interactions. We've learned that while people with depression show normal activation in the circuitry of the brain associated with joy, it's transient and does not persist.

People with the capacity to persist in activating these brain regions critical for positive emotion and who can sustain this activation more over time report higher levels of well-being and exhibit lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

One way to cultivate joy and to activate this region of the brain involves reflecting on what I've called "innate basic goodness"-- the human propensity to desire happiness and be free from suffering. All humans share this same basic quality, and we bring this to the fore in all of our interactions. It enables us to respond to those around us in ways that maximize their and, in turn, our own well-being.

Fear, Disgust and Anger

The neuroscientific bases for fear, disgust and anger share some similarities and have two key things in common: the amygdala and its role in recovery. The amygdala is a structure in the brain that gets your "fight-or-flight" mechanism going. It signals to the rest of the body when something's salient or wrong, whether it's a car that veers a little too close to the sidewalk (fear) or the mere thought of broccoli pizza (disgust) in the eyes of a preteen.

It's normal and healthy to show a context-appropriate response -- an emotion that is adaptive in a particular situation -- but you don't want these emotions to linger beyond the point when they're actually useful. We know that mindfulness meditation can be helpful in regulating these emotions. Such training results in less anticipatory worry toward pain and a faster recovery following negative or uncertain events.

Anger, however, poses even greater dangers if left in charge. Research has suggestedthat anger is biologically toxic and can have harmful effects on the cardiovascular system, increasing a person's risk for a heart attack. In many cases, anger arises when our goals are thwarted. The challenge is to harness the energy that may be associated with anger and figure out ways to work around the obstacle rather than banging your head against it.

Sadness

Unlike anger, contextually-appropriate sadness is not toxic to the body; however, in circumstances where sadness holds the reins unnecessarily, people can develop depression. To manage sadness, there's an approach that may sound strange at first -- generosity. We are often saddened by tragic circumstances, by all the hardships that people have to endure, and being able to help others to relieve suffering contributes to others' well-being and our own. It also helps us to take the perspective of others and directly see that we are not the only ones who are suffering. Generosity is a very direct antidote -- neuroscientifically-speaking -- to sadness, and it activates circuits in the brain associated with joy.

As we navigate through our day and encounter people who look like they are having a difficult time (such experiences have become all too common during my frequent travels), we can do a simple mental exercise by looking at each person and reflecting on how, just like us, they share the same basic wish to be free of suffering. During those moments, we can say a simple phrase to ourselves such as, "May you be free of suffering and the causes of suffering."

In addition to mental exercise, recent findings indicate that physical activity may help prevent depression. Moreover, aerobic exercise is one of the best ways to increase brain plasticity, and if accompanied by positive psychological input that can be generated through the types of mental exercises noted above, the combination can be particularly effective.

 As a body language expert I knew I was going to be intrigued with the way each emotion was animated. I thought about all the research I have studied over the years about emotion and facial expressions done by Dr. Paul Ekman. Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Famous People Who Admit to Nervousness and Stage Fright

Famous People Who Admit to Nervousness and Stage Fright

Show me a person who says, “I never feel nervous when I go to present,” and “I’ll show you an “automatic presenter.”

Some of the world’s most famous presenters freely admit to nervousness and stage fright—

Benedict Cumberbatch - He is so adorable, and his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes a marvel. And I loved him in The Imitation Game. He does, like Hugh Grant, often play bumbling and or odd characters so he can channel his nervousness into the part.

Adele - That booming voice, and she still gets scared.

Bob Dylan - That incredible creative man has stage fright. I get he has a bad voice, but he is a poet/lyricist of great magnificence.

Jason Alexander - He acts nervous all the time, how can he tell? By the way did you see him in the TV version of Bye Bye Birdie? Lots of fun.

Maya Angelou - She writes magnificently and has that amazing voice, but she also has stage fright.

Hugh Grant - There is a great interview on YouTube where he talks about it. Look up Graham Norton Show Hugh Grant Stage Fright. He talks about he even gets it working on animated films!

Annie Lenox - She says she gets over it by enjoying the moment. 

Brian Wilson - (The Beach Boys) Receives shoulder and neck rubs and prays before his concerts.

Sir Lawrence Olivier - Yes, one of the greatest actors of all time had stage fright.

Barbara Streisand - (singer and actress) I have seen her perform live. She had not done a live performance in years. She is wonderful, and you can see that she is a bit shy but she uses humor to overcome her fear.

Nicole Kidman (actress) - I was surprised. In her roles she always comes across as a bit plastic. I don’t see the vulnerability other people seem to see.

Michael Douglas - (actor) Yes, surprising.

Alfred Hitchcock - (director) I took a film class on him and read several biographies. As a child his mother was ill, and made him come home from school every day and stand at the end of her bed and report on his day. That would strike fear into anyone’s heart.

Winston Churchill - He dealt with it by drinking!

John Cougar Mellancamp (musician, actor)

William Shatner - He just keeps taking risks, and darn I admire that. If you can find the TV show where he and his wife remodel their home, you will be charmed with his boundless enthusiasm. I think that helps him as well. 

Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.