why some conversations rearrange your brain

on deep listening, emergent selves, and how the right questions unlock hidden interiors

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.” – Anaïs Nin

A Glimpse Beyond the Frame

I was walking along the beach with a friend recently, one of the most emotionally articulate people I know, when he told me his friends used to call him a robot. He said that for years, until very recently, he found it impossible to recognise his own feelings.

I was stunned. This didn’t match anything I thought I knew about him. It was a version that had existed the entire time quietly, just out of view, but I’d never imagined it. That gap between the person I knew and the person beside me lodged itself in my mind like a splinter of wonder.

I realised how partial my perception had been, how much I’d flattened him into a convenient coherence, a shortcut we all take. It’s easier, after all, to compress people into neat narratives that fit inside our mental maps.

But then, in one small moment in a tossed-off comment, that tidy version split open, and I remembered: Oh. You are vast.

artist Amanda Chung / lucky risograph

And what surprises me most is that this vastness was always there. Dormant. Just waiting for the right breath of air, the right question, to rise to the surface.

We move through the world assuming we’ve mapped the people closest to us. We know their coffee orders, their dating history, the last podcast they recommended. But these are surface echoes, tidy exports of interior life. And interior life is rarely tidy.

The truth is, we all contain secret cities. Hidden interiors. Rooms within rooms. Parts of us still mid-bloom. Most of the time, these depths stay tucked away, because no one ever thought to ask. Because life moves fast. Because it’s rare to feel truly listened to.

But when we do, when someone meets us with spacious attention, asks the question that doesn't live on the surface, something miraculous happens. We unfold.

This piece is about that process - how deep listening, the right question, or even a simple gesture can rearrange our understanding of someone else. And in the process, reshape who we are too.

Drawing by Juan Osorno

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The Question as Key

Sometimes I meet people out in the world, in passing at houseparties or picnics, who appear closed off: flat, with glazed eyes and silicone souls. I think I can come across that way sometimes too. But more and more, I’m starting to wonder if it’s not a lack of their depth, just a lack of invitation. Or maybe it’s my own failure to create the kind of conditions where something deeper can emerge. As Henrik Karlsson writes,

"If someone seems boring to you... it might be that you don’t know how to prompt them. You probably don’t know how much beauty lies hidden in the people around you."

Asking the right question is a form of care and love. It believes there's more to find and calls someone into fuller being. It’s also not always the words themselves, but the way they’re held. A why instead of a what. A silence left long enough to be filled. A softness that says: “I’m not in a rush.” Sometimes, all it takes is: tell me more about that.

Words as Portals

“Words are events, they do things, change things... They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

Language builds reality. Beyond an exchange of words, it’s an act of mutual world-making.

Recently, I met a guy named G in my hostel dorm. I was caught in the middle of an emotional decision, feeling unsure and suspended. G listened. Really listened. And then, with a kind of quiet certainty, he shared his own story in a way that offered perspective, courage, a mirror.

He said just enough, and gently pushed me toward what I already knew I needed to do. His words and presence gave my full self permission to lean into the feeling I’d been resisting. And with them, something in me softened and realigned.

That’s what language can do. It makes new realities possible and makes us possible.

There’s a saying that “actions speak louder than words.” But words are actions. They land and rearrange. They build scaffolding for thought and memory. They shape what becomes sayable, and in turn, what becomes thinkable. It’s why a well-placed phrase can rewire your inner architecture. A question can unlock a forgotten room. A conversation can leave behind an invisible structure that you keep returning to.

Think of all the times someone else’s phrasing helped you finally name something you’d only felt vaguely. As if their words handed you the scaffolding to climb into a new version of yourself (what the best art does!), because language sculpts thought. Every conversation subtly alters the brain’s architecture. Every sentence is a small act of rewiring.

That’s why some conversations change you even if you barely speak through what’s transferred. Emotion, belief, subtle permission. You begin to see yourself as someone capable of softness, of insight, of love.

Words also have a mirrored quality. In conversation, the brain syncs through listening. Neuroscientist Uri Hasson, PhD, a pioneer in neural mirroring (also known as brain coupling), examined brain scans of subjects in conversation. What he found was surprising, Fredrickson writes:

“Far from being isolated to one or two brain areas, really clicking with someone else appears to be a whole brain dance in a fully mirrored room…In good communication, two individuals come to feel a single, shared emotion … distributed across their two brains.”

The vagus nerve is also involved in forging personal connections. It stimulates the facial muscles necessary for making eye contact and synchronising our expressions with others; it even helps the tiny muscles in the inner ear better track another voice amid background noise. We appear to be programmed to harmonise with fellow humans. '

Entire networks, far beyond just the language center, fire in unison. The conversation becomes a shared mindspace in real time, a full-body alignment, a neurological duet. This coupling allows for shared mental models, as meaning is co-constructed.

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Psychoactive Conversations and Emergent Selves

V once described deep conversation as flying through space while holding hands (an example of a phrase that’s always stuck with me).

There’s something alchemical about good dialogue, which creates new terrain, a kind of mindspace travel powered by safety and listening.

When two minds begin to sync in this way, neuroscientists call it “brain coupling”. Your vagus nerve softens, your inner ear attunes, your whole nervous system hums with recognition and harmony. These are the conversations that rearrange you and give you access to the answers you seek, to a new part of yourself, a new angle, a room you didn’t know existed.

When we really listen, we do more than hear and begin to regulate. Our attention becomes a co-therapist, a kind of social nervous system. In polyvagal theory, this is called co-regulation: the way our bodies attune to one another’s tone of voice, facial expression, and breath. When someone listens gently, with curiosity, your vagus nerve responds. Your stress lowers. Your capacity to think more freely expands.

This is why the right kind of conversation feels safe. It creates an inner spaciousness. Your words stop curling in on themselves for protection and begin to reach outward.

Sociologist Charles Horton Cooley once said, “I am not who I think I am. I am not who you think I am. I am who I think you think I am.” Identity is socially looped. So when someone sees us as expansive, we begin to act accordingly. Their attention creates the conditions for our becoming.

In this way, conversation is both mirror and catalyst. It reflects, and reshapes, who we are.

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Familiar Strangers

Strangely, it’s often those closest to us that we stop being curious about. We fall into rhythms. He’s the anxious one. She’s the advice-giver. They’re the funny one. Roles we play so often we forget they’re roles. Even our dearest friends become frozen in familiarity, with their updates unnoticed and their edges dulled by memory. We stop noticing the slow tectonic shifts of their inner world. We relate to the last version of them we remember, not to the self still unfolding in real time.

Cognitive neuroscience has a name for this compressing tendency: Theory of Mind is our ability to infer what others are thinking or feeling. It’s essential for empathy, but it also means we’re constantly guessing, often lazily. We stop updating our internal models. We relate not to the person in front of us, but to their fossilised outline. We replace curiosity with prediction.

Meanwhile, their interior keeps blooming, just out of reach.

But what if your oldest friends still contain versions of themselves you’ve never met?

What if all it takes is the right moment, the right pause, the right kind of curiosity?

What’s extraordinary is that your brain wants to model other people - it devotes much of its resting state to doing just that. The default mode network, the part of your brain that activates when you're not focused on a task, spends much of its time simulating other minds: rehearsing conversations, empathising, reflecting. We are literally wired to think in relation.

So what happens when we take the shortcut of assumption? We close off access to those rich simulations. We lose touch with our own capacity for wonder.

But we are not fixed, we are emergent.. We become who we are in the company of others - their questions, their attention, their love. Their belief in us when our own faith falters.

Transformation rarely happens in solitude. It happens in spaces where someone else believes change is possible. Where someone sees a version of you you’re still growing into.

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Speak. Ask. Listen. Fly.

We don’t need to travel far to discover new worlds. Sometimes, they’re sitting across from us, sipping coffee, waiting to be seen again. Everybody in their lives is really waiting for people to ask them questions, so that they can be truthful about who they are and how they became what they are.

So ask the question that lingers, opens and reveals. And listen for the answer, the pause before it, the subtle shift in posture, the breath they take before something brave. Because every interaction is a quiet invitation to be more alive with each other, to be mid-bloom together, to see, and be changed by the seeing.

The people you love are vast. And you - you're still becoming, too.

Accompanying songs (listen while you read for the full experience!):

Bloom by the Paper Kites

Can’t believe the way we flow by James Blake

Secret of Life by Lord Huron

I’ll be your mirror by the Velvet Underground

First day of my life by Bright Eyes

Talking with strangers by Miya Folick

Open by Rhye

Enjoy the silence by Depeche Mode

Collide by Tiana Major9

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A mini meditation / poem on this concept just for fun

The Breath Before Words

what hidden worlds lie beyond your every word? and mine

speaking into existence

universes living underground

birthed into being by our bold breath

these words will allow us to begin again

i speak

you also speak

and so

so it is

Visual and word vibescape that further elaborate on these ideas:

She who looks with the look that recognizes, that studies, respects, doesn’t take, doesn’t claw, but attentively, with gentle restlessness, contemplates and reads, caresses, bathes, makes the other gleam. Brings back to light the life that's been buried, fugitive, made too prudent. Illuminates it and sings it its names. -Hélène Cixous, from Coming to Writing and Other Essays

“Intimacy is not something that just happens between two people; it is a way of being alive. At every moment, we are choosing either to reveal ourselves or to protect ourselves, to value ourselves or to diminish ourselves, to tell the truth or to hide. To dive into life or to avoid it. Intimacy is making the choice to be connected to, rather than isolated from, our deepest truth at that moment.” - Alex Tan

“A person is a person through other persons.” – Ubuntu philosophy

"if you find a conversational partner who’s willing to get a little weird, you can use the room you’re in to build a shared memory palace. when you discover an interesting train of thought, you “place” it somewhere in the room. pretty soon, you’re literally surrounded by the convo. The weird thing is you can come up with new connections or concepts by physically moving/dancing between the landmarks in your mini memory palace. You’re basically setting up an infrastructure that lets you see ideas in visual form before you know how to translate them into words"

“Understanding of the self only arises in relationship, in watching yourself in relationship to people, ideas, and things; to trees,

the earth, and the world around you and within you. Relationship is the mirror in which the self is revealed. Without self-knowledge there is no basis for right thought and action. - Jiddu Krishnamurti

The way we act toward ‘others’ is shaped by the way we imagine them. Both philosophic and literary descriptions of such imagining show the difficulty of picturing other persons in their full weight and solidity.

Do you understand? When I am done telling you these stories, when you’re done listening to these stories, I am no longer I, and you are no longer you. In this afternoon we briefly merged into one. After this, you will always carry a bit of me, and I will always carry a bit of you, even if we both forget this conversation. - Hao Jingfang, Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation

Love has something to do with the notion of being seen — the opposite of invisibility. The invisible, the unwitnessed, the unacknowledged, the isolated, the lonely — these are the unloved. Loving attention illuminates the unseen, escorting them from the frontiers of lovelessness into the observed world. To truly see someone — anyone — is an act that acknowledges and forgives our common and imperfect humanity. Love enacts a kind of vigilant perception — whether it is to a partner, a child, a co-worker, a neighbour, a fellow citizen, or any other person one may encounter in this life. Love says softly — I see you. I recognise you. You are human, as am I. — Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files Issue #103

In a dialogue, each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him. Rather, it may be said that the two people are making something in common, i.e., creating something new together. - David Bohm

We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world making projects – mutual worlds – and new directions – may emerge. Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option… Staying alive – for every species requires liveable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference… Without collaboration, we all die.

“People you love become part of you — not just metaphorically, but physically. You absorb people into your internal model of the world. Your brain refashions itself around the expectation of their presence. After the breakup with a lover, the death of a friend, or the loss of a parent, the sudden absence represents a major departure from homeostasis. As Kahlil Gibran put it in The Prophet, “And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.” In this way, your brain is like the negative image of everyone you’ve come in contact with. Your lovers, friends, and parents fill in their expected shapes. Just like feeling the waves after you’ve departed the boat, or craving the drug when it’s absent, so your brain calls for the people in your life to be there. When someone moves away, rejects you, or dies, your brain struggles with its thwarted expectations. Slowly, through time, it has to readjust to a world without that person.” - neuroscientist David Eagleman

Love has something to do with the notion of being seen — the opposite of invisibility. The invisible, the unwitnessed, the unacknowledged, the isolated, the lonely — these are the unloved. Loving attention illuminates the unseen, escorting them from the frontiers of lovelessness into the observed world. To truly see someone — anyone — is an act that acknowledges and forgives our common and imperfect humanity. Love enacts a kind of vigilant perception — whether it is to a partner, a child, a co-worker, a neighbour, a fellow citizen, or any other person one may encounter in this life. Love says softly — I see you. I recognise you. You are human, as am I. - — Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files Issue #103

"You're not as cold as you pretend to be," she said. "I think your doors open in different places, that's all. Most people just don't know how to get into you. They knock and they knock where the door is supposed to be, but it's a blank wall. But you're there. I've watched you. I've seen you do some awfully cold things warmly and some warm things coldly. Or does that make sense?" –Mr. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

“The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self. The ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone, and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them, and to have believed in them, and sometimes, just to have accompanied them, for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone”

It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other. Having her hair examined as a part of her self, not as material or a style. Having her lips, nose, chin caressed as they might be if she were a moss rose a gardener paused to admire. She floated near but outside her own body, feeling vague and intense at the same time. Needing nothing. Being what there was. - Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Nothing you become will disappoint me; I have no preconception that I’d like to see you be or do. I have no desire to foresee you, only to discover you. You can’t disappoint me.” - Mary Haskell in a letter to Kahlil Gibran

The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others. - Alain de Botton, On Love