Church, one of the sites of the savanna book festival. Starting now is offer Celeste Headley talking about the importance of civil communication. Good afternoon. Hope you are enjoying the book festival. My name is our styles and im delighted to have you join me in the 11th annual savanna book 1st. The festival is presented by georgia power. David and nancy cintron, she and family foundation, and mark and pat, many thanks to jack and mary romanos come our sponsors for this glorious venue Trinity United Methodist church. We would like to extend special thanks to our individual donors who have made and continue to make Saturdays Free festival events possible. 90 of our revenue comes from donors just like you. We are very excited to have savanna book festival apps available for your phones, just look in your program for instructions for how to download it. Immediately following the presentation, celeste will sign copies of her book out here and if you are planning to stay for the following either presentation we ask that you move forward so the measures can get a good count of available seats so we let everybody and that we can. Take a moment now to set your phone to do not disturb. If you dont know how to do it you can also turn it off. No flash photography. Same thing if you dont know how to not use the flash dont take the picture. For the question and answer portion, we need you to raise your hand and an usher will ring a microphone to you. Here is the hard part. Dont start asking your question until the microphone gets there because we cant hear you. In the interest of time and to be fair to everyone we ask that you keep your questions short and no long stories. Celeste headley is with us courtesy of Savannah State university, bob and linda, celeste is the host of the georgia Public Broadcasting Program on second thought, as well as a previous cohost of the takeaway, midwest correspondent for National Public radios daytoday and classically trained soprano. In between all of this she has written a book called we need to talk. A very good book about communications, one that i will have my wife read very soon. Please give me a warm welcome to Celeste Headley. [applause] im a buddhist, so this feels a little uncomfortable. We tried it the other way for a really long time. Generation after generation we have taught our children and ourselves that if something is going to cause an argument we dont talk about it. It used to be we didnt talk about politics and religion. Now we have added race, we have added climate change, we have added guns. Eventually we are just going to add everything into we are just not talking about anything difficult anymore. We dont talk to people unless they agree with you. You dont talk to people if you are never going to be challenged. That means you are not learning anything new about the subject. Forgive me if i get a little bit emotional because after the shooting in florida last week i keep seeing headlines, quotes from people saying it was an unspeakable tragedy. It is not unspeakable. It has to be spoken of. We have to speak about it. [applause] i honestly could not care less what your views are. We, all of us, most of us have people in our families that disagree with us, right . That is what makes holidays so awkward. You can get along with people who dont agree with you. You can talk to them. Instead of avoiding these subjects that leads to an argument, you have to learn to talk about them without arguing. It is much easier than you think. I just want to start with telling you exactly how to do that and there are a number of steps that will help you but theres really only one. That is stop trying to change peoples minds. Stop trying to convince them that you are right and they are wrong. When was the last time you had a disagreement with someone and at some point in the conversation they went you know what . I am completely wrong, you are right . I have totally changed my mind. It doesnt happen. Science can tell you that but that is another one of those studies, i can go into research after research that tells you we dont change our minds over the course of the conversation but we already know that. I have been talking a lot over the last week. The attempt to change peoples minds is making us all frustrated and miserable. Part of the reason we arguing about it is because we are trying to change peoples minds and it is not going to happen. You are basically beating your head against the wall repeatedly and repeatedly and repeatedly and then thinking im never going to do that again. It is not the exercise, it is the beating of the head against the wall that is making you upset, dont do it anymore. You have 0 control over what someone else thinks, the way they view things, that is 100 not in your control but guess what is in your control . You. What you think, what you hear, what you listen to. If instead of going into these conversations saying i will have it out, i will score points, when this debate, that will make you upset. Instead of doing that, going to every conversation saying i wont leave this conversation until i have learned some, you can accomplish that 100 of the time. Guns at this point is more divisive as a voting issue than race, abortion, samesex marriage, marijuana. Really . Really . We cant talk about firearms . I dont care if you are a member of the nra, i can talk to you about it. How many of you know everything you need to know about guns, and you dont need to listen to anybody else ever because you have nothing to learn about it . I dont care if you are a gun owner. You think you know everything about guns . I own a smart phone, i dont know anything about the phone. Theres lots of stuff i own i dont know anything about. There is no issue on which you can tell me you are the ultimate expert and you have nothing to learn about it. That is not true. That means you are going to have to change your habits. I am tired of trying entire society doing the same thing over and over and over again and throwing up our hands and going they called me an idiot. Of course they did. They didnt listen to you. It is possible you didnt listen to them. If we plan to progress you cant stand on principle. It is literally in the phrase. You are just standing. You are not going anywhere. How many of you made promises at some point about the things you were going to do or not do . I am never going to, and then end up when i had a kid when i was pregnant i swore i was never going to raise my voice to my child in anger. Yeah. We all make principles in our heads. It is ridiculous to think you are going to stand by the man never going to change. They are going to change. But the way they change is by realizing you dont know everything. What i didnt realize was my son was going to be a huge pain in the butt. You have to evolve. Right now we are not evolving of the reason we are not evolving as we put our own comfort above Everything Else and heres the thing about being comfortable. Comfort is the enemy of innovation. Have created bubbles around ourselves and we have done a great job of it. I could point to you all the research from pew. They have incredible othership, telling us the same thing over and over. One of the reports is called the spiral of silence because social media, which we dreamed was going to open up conversation, we social media was going to make people nervous about raising their voice and stating there opinion was going to embolden them and opened the conversation and make it more free and tolerance. It did the opposite. It turns out that people who get shut down on social media are less likely to have a facetoface conversation. Social media is shutting down conversation, the opposite of what was that is why they call it a spiral of silence. We thought the smart phones in our hands which at their heart are a phone, we thought they would increase the number of conversations we have. At this point the average american, this research is three years old so i bet it is worse. At this point the average american adult spend 30 minutes a day texting and six minutes or less on the phone. Companies like cocacola, cisco, jpmorgan, Goldman Sachs have used their phones so little they eliminated voicemail systems. They dont pay for it anymore because it is not used. But heres the thing. Your smart phone is a crappy replacement for conversation. I do not know why we keep inventing new replacements for the thing that human beings do better than any other species. It is probably the only thing we do better than other species. I am not even trying to be funny here. We all know in a 1to1 fight we lose out with a mosquito. We are not impressive. But the one thing we do well, the reason we have dominated on the planet is because we collaborate. When you mess with one human you are usually messing with bunch of other humans. That is why we have succeeded. That is a formula we are messing with. We are breaking it. Because we think each and every one of us, google makes us think we are a few clicks from being an expert in every. We are beginning to think we are in and of ourselves enough for our family unit, our small little tribe and it is not true. There is no replacement for the human voice, none. It is so complex. In many ways magical, science cannot explain how it works. Theres research at princeton into what is called neural coupling. What they did was they had one person coming to an fmri, functional wont resonance imaging machine that allows us to watch the brain thinking while the person is conscious. It took someone up to an f mri and had us tell them the story from their life, in one case she told the story of a disastrous prom. A bunch of other people came in and listens to her telling the story. They found something really miraculous. They found out that when these people were listening in an engaged way to the other woman talking they their brains synced up. They moved in perfect sync. In fact it was so inexact at times that the listeners brain would anticipate changes in the speakers brain by a fraction of a second. That his mind meld. If we saw it in star trek we wouldnt think it was realistic. That is what happens when a pair of human ears listens to a human voice. We cant explain it, we dont know how it works, we dont know why it works, but we know that is something humans do that other species cant. We can bond with one another. We can reach one another on a level beyond what science can track. That is what we are trying to replace with emojis. Seriously. You cant. There is all kinds of Ways Technology just cant replace what you can do with your voice. Apologies. The process that begins with an apology and leads eventually to forgiveness and moving on is a relatively complicated physiological and neurological process. Take your finger and put it to the top of your right here, move it up 1 inch and move it back 1 inch. That is the Compassion Center of your brain. When the process of forgiveness begins you have to get an apology of some form in your Compassion Center goes on and leave through the rest of the process that makes you able to forgive that person and forget about it. If someone reads an apology in any form, nothing happens here. If you send an apology by email or, god forbid, text, nothing. Crickets. Why do we avoid calling the person or seeing them to apologize anyway . Why do we do that . It is easier. It is tough to say you are sorry to somebody. It is really tough and painful and guess what. When you are apologizing to someone and they either hear or see that it is tough for you Compassion Center lights up and then the process begins. The apology is effective because it is hard. If it is not hard, there is no point. This is another way in which you cannot replace human communication between one voice and one pair of ears. And listen, there are tons of things humans do terribly. There are lots of ways that our smart phone can fill in for things we are not great at. Our brains are not computers. Our memories are bad. We are bad at storing information and recalling it when we want to. That is what a computer is for. That is great, that is awesome. Like it or not, even though most people cant find their way home from their Grocery Store with with other phones anymore gps is pretty awesome. We used to have to rely on people to give us directions to our houses and some people are terrible at it. After falling their crappy directions and getting lost you get to their house and they are like high. That doesnt happen anymore. You dont have to get angry at friends and family members for giving you terrible, terrible directions. You have a gps. That is fantastic. Mind tells me if there is a traffic jam which is always because i live in atlanta. There are plenty of things for us to use technology for. Not conversation. There is no replacement. It cant be improved upon at this point. And the other part of that is the adoption of Smart Phone Technology has been so rapid. As of 2003, only maybe 10 of American Adults in the United States raise your hand if you own a smart phone . Over 90 . In the world today according to the United Nations more people have access to a cell phone then a working toilet. That is incredibly rapid growth. It has outpaced our ability to understand the effect. Because clinical studies take years and they have to be peerreviewed and replicated. We are only now beginning to see some of the effects smart phones are having on our brains and it is not great. For example they did a study in the uk in which they had hundreds of people sit down and have a conversation with strangers and afterwards they would ask them okay, tell us about the other person, what were they like, where is a friendly . In half of those conversations they were come and place a cell phone down on the table. It belonged to neither person, never made a noise but in those conversations in which there was a cell phone present and visible they were 62 more likely to say the end other person was unfriendly, and trustworthy and unlikable. I want you to about how many times youve gone to lunch with somebody and just set your cell phone on the table and felt good because you didnt look at it. The thing is it is having an effect on their brain because they can see it. The other side of that is having an effect on your brain because part of your brain may 10 of your brain is thinking about that cell phone. It is basically insight or flight mode, ready for it to make a noise. Which means if you sit at your desk and you are one of the people who habitually keeps your email open all the time like always have that outlook open, your iq drops by ten points. Because part of your brain is about the email. It is occupied in wondering, making sure it is ready for that notification to come in. So again, i am not telling you to get rid of your cell phone, im just saying put it away. It is not about getting rid of technology and becoming the unit bomber in a shack. It is about being aware of the power of that technology and being smart about it. It is not about not letting technology do the things we are bad at but reclaiming things we do better than anybody else. Reclaiming what is basically our humanity. There is more really mind blowing research. My favorite researcher who will tell you what a dork i am because i have a favorite researcher, is nicholas epperly. He has been researching these intangibles of human nature for years. Just recently, a few months ago, he did this very long study, a whole crew of people, when we read an opinion we disagree with in any form, doesnt matter if it is printed in a newspaper, book, and email, facebook, if we read it we are much more likely to think we disagree because that person is stupid and ignorant of the real issues. If we hear someone telling us the same opinion, whether it is recorded coming in a podcast, telling us that opinion, we are much more likely to they will disagree with us because they have a different experience and perspective. What that means is the human voice is literally humanizing. It is the voice itself, some quality of the human voice that helps us to recognize each other as human beings deserving of respect. And we do deserve respect. Every person deserves respect. Not every opinion, but every person. And it also means this process we are going through right now of transferring all of our communication to the Digital World is dehumanizing us. Of course we hate each other, we dont see each other as human beings deserving of respect. This is not a partisan issue, if you are thinking absolutely, those liberals are always jerks, or the other way, doesnt matter, what you are thinking, it is not partisan. Every Single Person is equally prone to do this to the other side. Every person is equally prone to confirmation bias. Do you know what confirmation bias is . It is where you believe something and then someone gives you evidence proving that belief is wrong and it makes you believe it harder. We are the only species that suffers from confirmation bias and that is because confirmation bias is not helpful. It is not really helpful. If you have a cat and the cat truly believes there are in the next room, a mouse, if you have a mouse and the mouse totally believes there is no cat in the next room and you show them evidence of cat in the next room, lots of cats and that makes the mouse believe harder there are no cat in the next room ice would basically be wiped off the face of the planet. So you have to ask yourself, why do we have confirmation bias . Why do all of us have confirmation bias . How does it help us . Because frankly, why would it survive through millennia of evolution if it did not in some way help . Bible tell you what i believe even though we dont fully understand it yet. I confirmation bias is actually a strength. I what it does is prove to us constantly that we need each other, that we need to talk to each other. Because we are our own checks and balances. I need you guys to tell me when i said something that balls. And i need to believe you. We need each other. All of us. There is no virtue in the saying i dont talk to people like that. It is not a virgin no matter how vile you think their opinion is. That is not something to brag about. You can talk to everybody. I will give you two examples. One of them is georgias own. Do you know who arizona clayton is . One person. There is a street named after her in atlanta. Clayton was a good friend of the kings, doctor king and his wife, coretta. When they decided to create the great neighborhoods initiative, Great Society initiative to strengthen neighborhoods in atlanta, she was appointed as head of