生物學上解釋為什麽有人愛刷屏

      前兩天在最近一期的Times上看到一篇文章《ON MUTE》—— Overtalkers are everywhere - but saying less will get you more BY Dan Lyons

小標題：The World Is Filled With Overtalkers. You Run Into Them All the Time.

 

       同誌們啊，千真萬確啊，尤其在工作中和網絡上的Talkaholics （刷屏者或話癆）真的是無處不在，令人無處可躲。有意思的是有生物學和醫學專家已經對Talkaholics產生原因做了20多年的研究，而且已經推出了Talkaholic Scale供患者測試。文章的作者曾經是個Talkaholic，並因此丟工作，老婆孩子都離他遠遠的。他這樣形容他和Talkaholics: Talkaholics cannot just wake up one day and choose to talk less.  Their talking is compulsive. They don't talk just a little bit more than everyone else, but a lot more, and they do this all the time, even when they know that other people think they talk too much.  And here is the gut punch: talkaholics continue to talk even when they know that what they are about to say is going to hurt them. They simply cannot stop.

他為此找到了Michael Beatty教授。看看生物學和醫學上的解釋：

“It's biology, ” Beatty told me when we got on the phone. "It's all nature, not nurture. It starts to develop prenatally." Twenty years ago, he pioneered a field called communibilology, which studies communication as a biological phenomenon. He collaborated with neuroscientists, giving study participants EEGs to measure their brain waves and sticking them into fMRI machines to watch their brains light up when they looked at pictures or listened to audio recordings.

A lot of communication researchers thought he was going down a blind alley, but Beatty was sure he was right. “To me, it would be weird if the way we communicate was not related to the brain,” he said. “We just didn’t know how.”

看見了嗎？天生的！重點來了：

In 2010, Beatty and his colleagues discovered that talkativeness is linked to brain-wave imbalances. Specifically, it’s about the balance between neuron activity in the left and right lobes in the anterior region of the prefrontal cortex. Ideally, the left and right lobe should have about the same amount of neuronal activity when a person is at rest. If there’s an asymmetry—if your left side is more active than the right—you’re likely to be shy. If the right side is more active, you’re likely to be talkative. The greater the imbalance, the further out on the talkativeness spectrum you will tend to be. A talkaholic’s right lobe will fire a ton while the left side barely flickers.

 可惜的是教授說這是不可逆轉的。那咋辦呢？作者自己總結了一套方法，這個方法電子版上沒有，我照張照片您瞧瞧，或許對您有用。How to stop overtalking:

1. When possible, say nothing

2. Master the power of the pause

3. Quit Social Media

4. Seek out silence

5. Learn how to listen

 

 

有興趣的可看Times上的全文或者找作者的書來看：

https://time.com/6248092/talking-less-will-get-you-more/

這篇文章是作者書中的節選，全書的名字是：The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World.