 Hi, this is Tracy Chocohama Espinosa, and this is a video on tones of voices and how they influence how people learn. So fascinating, but also something that really kind of escapes most of us, is that the way we speak to each other, the tone of voice that we use, prosody, the way that we interact with one another, when we choose to speak in a loud voice or a soft voice, has an influence on how other people perceive our communication, and if we're teachers, how students learn. We know that perception, listening to different people's tones of voices, is really baked into the genetic makeup of every individual, and since your brain adapts to what it does most, it's so interesting to see that most people will pay much more attention to a voice that is not their own than to their own voices, because other people's voices are novel, and perceived changes in intonation in others' voices more than their own. We know that the combination of faces and voices is really powerful, so that students in classrooms, for example, make judgment calls really, really fast. If they look at that face and they decide if they believe it or not, but in addition to that, whether or not the tone of voice seems to carry the message that the face is showing, this is why somebody who sort of stares down at you and says, you're doing just fine in my class, is not believable. The face nor the tone of voice is carrying the meaning that is implied by those words, so these carry very powerful messages, and this is why we say many times, it's not what you said, it's how you said it that makes a difference and that carries the message of the day. So we have studied memory in the brain for many, many years, right? We have a lot of good insight there. What is a recent discovery quite interesting is that another additional discovery related to memory systems in the brain is that voice memory, memory for people's voices, is different than general working memory in the brain, so we've now begun to weed out the fine lines of different types of memory systems, and we know that voices are in a different neural track than general working memory, which is interesting because working memory was always considered to be something that was called an auditory loop, like just hearing over and over again the information and a visual sketch pad, which was we actually see something written down, that would be in working memory. What's distinct about this is that the auditory loop is your own voice, but voice memory is a different neural track because it's somebody else's voice. It's also very interesting, again, looking back at what is innate or not about language in humans, is that humans have an innate sense of sound, but they also understand the correlation, so even four-month-old babies will look at a face and they can tell when the face is in sync with what is being said or not, and the system of linking faces and voices and putting them in sync is kind of interesting because there seems to be a suggestion of maybe overlapping networks in the brain related to those two systems. Another really interesting thing about tones of voice or sounds is that there is no single universally pleasing sound, but there are universally unpleasing sounds, so whereas you might think, okay, Red Hot Chili Peppers is the maximum and then somebody else's know it's Bach and somebody else's know it's Laurie Anderson or whatever it is, right? Everybody has their own tastes, for example, in music. What's so fascinating is that as I play notes on a piano, for example, some of you might love it and some of you might think, eh, but if I play the wrong note, everybody will notice, so it's really interesting about sounds in the sense that there are no universally pleasing sounds, but there are universally unpleasing sounds. Now there's some very interesting research going on now called motivational prosody, which has to do with the way that tones of voices may motivate or not motivate individuals, and you can actually have a register there. We've known this for a long time with little babies. We know that most people, men and women, their voice register shows up when they talk to a little baby they say, whoa, how are you little guy, right? Their voices go up higher, right? Well, now we've actually documented to see how a particular emotional state is transmitted by measuring pitch, intensity, variability, the speed rate and the voice quality, as well as if sounds like they're breathy and chesty or they're resonant or irregular or they're nasal or grumbled, all of these different subtleties can be measured now. And when they're compared with multiple studies that have been done over the decades, there's a relatively high accuracy rate across cultures for the sounds that relate to fear, disgust, joy, sadness and anger. Now this goes back to our conversation a little bit about are there universal emotions that are perceived universally? What's very interesting is if you look at the literature, there does seem to be this match then, not only about facial expressions but also tone of voice that relate to these basic emotional states. So this is why when you have somebody who tells you, you know, these beautiful words, you're doing fine, but they look like that and you're doing fine, we know that it's the way that something was said, not what was said, that carries more meaning. And this has to make us think a little bit about our social interactions with other people. How do we work with other people? How do we give them feedback? When does our tone of voice carry more meaning than those words that we may have thought at a conscious level and chosen the right words? But if they come off in the wrong tone, will that communication be spoiled by that? Okay, so that's the information on voices that goes with the video that has to do with faces and tones of voices. Those two things together have been shown to be interpreted by human beings pretty much unconsciously and almost immediately as soon as we see the other person, we make that judgment call about what their face is telling us and what their tone of voice is telling us. And so I look forward to conversations about this when we talk again later. See you soon.