Dr. Ethan Kross
speaker
968 appearances
6 recordings
6 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Dr. Ethan Kross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, so I think this is a great question because the inner voice is something that we carry with us wherever we go, but we don't tend to learn what it is, right? And actually, sometimes I get up there and speak to people and... they often wonder like, what is a purported serious scientist doing talking about a squishy topic like the voice inside our heads?
And it turns out that this is a remarkable tool of the human mind. So when I use the term inner voice, what I'm talking about is our ability to silently use language to reflect on things in our lives. And it turns out that's a type of Swiss army knife that we possess. It lets us do many different things. So just from the outset, Let me distinguish chatter from other inner voice operations.
I think of chatter as the dark side of the inner voice, and we'll get to that in a little bit. But having the ability to silently use language That is a boon to the human condition. So I'll give you a couple of benefits that it serves. What's your favorite sports team?
Okay. Sorry for the Washington Generals. So if you were to go to a game and root for them, what would you say? Go Globetrotters. Go Globetrotters. Okay. Can you repeat that phrase silently three times in your head right now? Yes. Okay. You've just used your inner voice.
So your inner voice is part of what we call our verbal working memory system, basic system of the human mind that lets us do something that I think is both extraordinary, but totally ordinary also. Your verbal working memory system, it's a mouthful, lets you keep information active for short periods of time. So before we had cell phones, How did you memorize phone numbers?
Interesting. Well, it's funny. When I go through this content, I give talks or workshops, I often say, 2090501, repeat that in your head three times. That's my childhood phone number. I'm like, go give it a shot. Give them a call. So for all I know, that person may be getting lots of phone calls. It's not my phone number. Um, But that's your verbal working memory system.
You go to the grocery store and you try to remember what you were supposed to get. Most people don't do that out loud. Like, oh crap, what was I supposed to get? Milk, cheese, eggs. You repeat that silently in your head. So that's one thing your inner voice allows you to do. Keep information active, verbal information. Your inner voice also helps you simulate and plan.
So before presentations or interviews, a lot of people report going over what they're going to say before that event.
remembering the first line of each paragraph in my head and then the rest just kind of falls out yeah we have a very similar similar style i will i will bullet out what the key ideas are and as long as i could bullet that out i am good to go but i will also rehearse those bullets in my head abcd so uh That's you using your inner voice as well.
Now, before a big presentation like a live event, I will go over the opening to my presentation and sometimes just carry that dialogue through when I'm going for a walk around the hotel before the event.
Yeah. I love the fact that you brought up songs there. So if you want to take a little detour here. So in my new book, Shift, we talk about, or I talk about how the different shifters that exist to push your emotions around and sensation, sensory experiences are one powerful, and I would argue often overlooked modality for shifting our emotions. So if you ask people, why do you listen to music?
What do you think most people say?
Feel, right? It's about emotions, feel good. So one study, the number was around like 95, 96% of participants who were asked said exactly gave the answer that you just gave. But then if you look at in other studies, hey, the last time you felt anxious or angry or sad, what did you do to push your emotions around?
The number of people who report using music to modulate their experience drops way down 10 to 30%. Music is a really powerful tool for modulating our emotions. I actually, an unintentional parenting victory for me was when my youngest daughter was around five or six and I was coaching soccer. I lived for these experiences. soccer games on the weekend.
I wasn't one of these overbearing coaches who would, you know, go crazy on the sidelines. It was just such joy to just watch these kids play. And typically my daughter was really excited to go to the game. But one morning she was just like not into it at all. She was bummed, like she was bummed out. It was bumming me out. I was, you know, catching her emotions. We
Got into the car and it just so happened that my cell phone was connected and the next song on the playlist happened to be Journeys Don't Stop Believin'. So you know the song, I presume. Don't judge me for having this on my playlist, please. The song comes on and I start jamming out to it, singing out loud like an embarrassing dad. And then I look in the back seat and I find her bopping her head.
And then the chorus comes, we get really excited. And then I pull up to the soccer court field and she just bursts out of the car and is like invigorated. That is the power of music to impact us. So I will often also have songs on prior to big talks that I'm getting ready to get in that mental frame of mind. And I don't think it's a coincidence that many athletes do this as well.
They've stumbled onto this tool that is quite powerful for pointing our emotional experience, our emotional trajectory in the direction we want it to point.
And I have a couple of – they touch on a couple of amazingly important issues that we need to get into. So let's just do them serially. So number one, has the study been done when you expose people to different kinds of music, sad versus – arousing, you know, happy music? Do you see that push people's emotions around? Yes.
In fact, sensory tools like music or visual images are one of the most powerful tools that we have in our arsenal for pushing people's emotions around in the context of experiments. So we want to induce a particular kind of state. We can play certain kinds of music or show people images that are designed to elicit positive or negative negative emotional experiences.
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