We had them repeat an emotion word like “anger” over and over. Eventually, the word becomes just a sound to the subject (“ang-gurr”) that’s mentally disconnected from its meaning. This technique has the same effect as creating a temporary brain lesion, but it’s completely safe and lasts less than one second. Then we immediately showed subjects two wordless faces side by side as before. Their performance dropped to a dismal 36 percent: nearly two-thirds of their yes/no decisions were incorrect!9
This is a really interesting thing that I did not know could happen.
