Rachel Carlson

So today on the show, the neuroscience of disagreement.

When we have the opportunity to engage with someone who thinks differently than we do, what's going on in our brains, and how can we make the most of those conversations?

Okay, Emily, imagine that you and I are about to have a disagreement.

So our pupils might dilate, our heart might start racing, and we might start to sweat a little more.

That's Rudy Mendoza-Denton.

He's a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley.

Rudy co-teaches a class from Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center on bridging differences.

He says we might not even notice these things while they're happening to us.

But on top of all of them, we start making these split-second decisions about whether or not we trust someone just by looking at their faces.

Those decisions, though, aren't always accurate.

Who's that?

That's Oriole Feldman-Hall, a researcher and social neuroscientist at Brown University.

And she says when we interact with someone we've decided is untrustworthy, or even someone who just belongs to another group than us, our amygdala starts to respond.

Yeah, our amygdala.

That is like our brain's threat detector.

I found a study from 2021 looking at exactly that.

So I called up the lead researcher, Joy Hirsch, to talk about it.

She's a neuroscience professor at Yale School of Medicine.

And the beauty of this study is that Joy and her team monitored the brains of multiple people at once while they talked to each other, which is so, so cool because it's pretty new in the neuroscience world.

Usually you're just looking at one person's brain at