The Science of Talking: Boost Your Mood, Sharpen Your Mind, and Protect Against Dementia | Maryellen MacDonald

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody, how are we doing? Today I'm talking to a cognitive scientist about how to harness something we all do. every day, talking.

We're going to cover how to use talking in order to prevent distraction, depression, dysregulation, dementia, and much more. Just to be clear from the jump here, and I already made a nod to this, but I want to make it super clear, my guest is defining talking in a broad way, not just having conversations with other people, but also having conversations with yourself. In other words, self talk and also writing to yourself, which is another kind of self talk. So again, she's defining talking broadly.

The she in question is Mary Allen Macdonald. She is the Donald P. Hayes Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She's a cognitive scientist with a focus on psycholinguistics, which is the study of how we comprehend, produce, and learn languages. She's also written a book, which is called More Than Words.

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