I had a bit of a minor epiphany this weekend regarding communication -- specifically, my own efforts to communicate, and what things contribute toward whether or not these efforts are effective.
Generally speaking, I feel that my communication is effective when the "output" I generate (whether it be in the form of text, speech, art, or any other means) corresponds to what I actually know, think, and feel about a particular subject or concept. While it can be difficult to gauge in advance whether any communicative effort will actually cause others to obtain a true, clear understanding of what's in my head, I can definitely say that my efforts "feel" more or less effective depending upon a variety of circumstances.
Anyway, though, the realization I had this weekend was that I probably need to be a lot more careful about using speech to discuss complex ideas. Sometimes I think I err too far toward the side of assuming I can do it effectively when, in fact, I would be a lot better off using a different medium or at least trying to get a sense of what the ideas I'm going to be discussing will be in advance (so I can write possibly-copious notes or even a script).
I'm usually reasonably okay with speech when I'm answering questions like, "What time is it?" or "What is your zip code?" -- that is, basic factual queries with easy reference points in the "world outside my head". There's also a particular sort of social setting I seem to do all right with as far as speaking goes, and that is the setting wherein those around me know me really well, to the point where we've got a lot of shared context -- and when the conversation itself isn't demanding constant responses from me.
The settings I find speech less effective in tend to be those wherein (a) those I'm trying to communicate with don't necessarily know me very well, and/or (b) I'm in a position of having to "summarize" ideas (or even just report on what I know about something, or how I feel) in real time.
The issue with trying to communicate with people who don't know me very well is that a lot of people apparently run around with all kinds of assumption sets in their heads regarding what it "means" when a person says this or that thing, or uses language in a particular way, etc. This is especially problematic when I'm trying to use speech, as one thing I've noticed is that speech tends to be taken as more indicative of what a person "really thinks" than writing is, even though for me, speech is actually a lot less likely to be accurate (which is one reason I love having a blog to point people to -- they're a lot more likely to get a sense of what goes on in my head from reading a few posts here than they are from talking to me for an hour).
I only became aware of this particular social bias a few years ago, and I'm still trying to figure out how best to deal with it.
Anyway, I've been told on more than one occasion, by people trying to reassure me (I suppose), that I "sound fine", and that I "shouldn't worry" about whether or not I'm coming across as articulate or not. This is where the major part of my recent minor epiphany really comes in -- basically, it occurred to me this weekend (in the context of a rather unusual communicative interaction, at least for me) that when people tell me I "sound fine", they're most probably assuming I'm nervous or something, and therefore trying to set my mind at ease.
But the thing is -- I'm not actually nervous, at least not in the way people seem to think I am in the circumstances where they tend to tell me to relax and not worry about how I sound. Rather, I'm just well aware of how often I've ended up saying things that have failed as far as communicating what is actually in my head goes, and when entering interactions, I am quite reasonably concerned about avoiding this.
I know I come across as "articulate" at least some of the time, but as far as I'm concerned, this can work at times as something of a liability as opposed to purely an asset.
For one thing, nobody (as far as I know) thought I had "speech issues" growing up, as I'd amassed a fairly large and complicated vocabulary by the time I was in preschool, and my elocution was generally very clear. But internally, I was often very disconnected from what I was actually saying -- to the point where I often couldn't describe sensations accurately at all, which led to no end of difficulty for my parents as they puzzled over whether I might be hungry, tired, sick, or just cranky. (I only found out later on that it is actually quite common for autistic kids to have no trouble reciting "innumerable nursery rhymes" -- as I could as a youngster -- yet not be able to explain how we feel in real-time.)
Furthermore, because I didn't even realize the extent to which words were "supposed to" connect with one's actual thoughts, I grew up with a lot of distorted ideas about what it meant to think something, know something, or even feel something.
I remember, for instance, teachers telling me that if I couldn't explain something from memory on demand, that meant I didn't really understand it. In sixth grade I once had to give an oral book report presentation, and even though I'd read the book I was presenting on multiple times, I was not able to summarize it in real time or even explain why I liked it. I had pictures and impressions in my head regarding what the book had been about, but the words just weren't there. This ended up getting me into trouble, as I ended up barely saying anything during the presentation, which was interpreted as me being "too lazy" to have actually done the assignment.
It wasn't actually until after college that I gradually came to realize that I actually knew a whole lot more than I thought I did about numerous things -- I just wasn't very good at expressing my knowledge verbally on every subject I had actual knowledge in.
Given this, it might sound contradictory that I have also experienced the opposite phenomenon on numerous occasions. It's not. Basically, due to the same general confusion over language that sometimes resulted in my being convinced I didn't know certain things because I couldn't talk about them, I also sometimes assumed that because I could speak fluently about something, that meant I did understand it.
I remember even in college being really lost in a chemistry class I was taking, only to be repeatedly reassured by the teacher that she could tell that I "knew my stuff", based on my sporadic interjections of certain words during class discussions -- when in fact, I'd barely studied and was actually quite clueless. I eventually buckled down, studied a lot more, and became considerably less lacking in clue, but my first semester went pretty badly in part because I still (at age 18) didn't really understand what it meant to "understand" something, and to demonstrate one's understanding.
So, basically, when I say that I'm concerned about how I'm going to come across when I speak, it's not about my having "public speaking jitters", or worrying about looking dumb, or anything of that nature. Rather, it's about knowing that my "speech module" doesn't automatically engage with my "thinking module", and hoping to find ways to avoid having this lead to problems. It's actually kind of astounding to look back and realize how much more clueless I was about communication even just five years ago than I am now, and I suspect I still have a lot to learn moving forward!
Monday, July 14, 2008
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14 comments:
This is very interesting. I see a lot of speech issues with M and getting her help for them has never been easy. She can "speak" well but sometimes getting the words out and having them be understandable is very difficult. She appears to know exactly what she is talking about but between the mind and the mouth it gets mixed up.
I have never been one to speak well in a larger group of people, unless it is written out in advance and I have practiced.
I also have great difficulty communicating when I can not see the person, like on the phone. In writing, I do better but even that tends to be difficult if emotions are invloved. If a person is wearing sunglasses I would prefer not to communicate with him or her at all. Since M wears them all the time I have to get used to that.
Marla said:
[M] can "speak" well but sometimes getting the words out and having them be understandable is very difficult.
Yeah, I can relate to that. One thing I've noticed is that I seem to use words differently than others do a lot of the time -- as in, I'll have some meaning associated with a word that turns out not to be the standard meaning (but that has strong associations for me), so people get confused. This happens more in speech than in writing but occasionally happens in writing as well.
She appears to know exactly what she is talking about but between the mind and the mouth it gets mixed up.
Well, it's very neat that you can at least tell that she knows what she is talking about! And regarding the "mixed up between mind and mouth" thing: for me that sort of thing happens regularly, and it is one reason trying to write out my thoughts helps a lot. I know and understand a lot of things but I don't "store" them linguistically all the time. My brain feels like it is filled with refrigerator poetry magnets sometimes -- discrete words and sometimes whole phrases, and when I am trying to put something into words, it's like sorting through a big pile of word and phrase magnets trying to fit the shape of what the words connote to the shape of the concept I am attempting to transmit.
I have never been one to speak well in a larger group of people, unless it is written out in advance and I have practiced.
For me the size of the group doesn't matter much, though I don't do well in crowds for a variety of reasons.
I also have great difficulty communicating when I can not see the person, like on the phone.
I don't like the phone much myself because I find it difficult to understand people over it. Sometimes at work I have to call the service desk (i.e., to get my computer fixed) and it sounds like those people are sitting in a tin can!
In writing, I do better but even that tends to be difficult if emotions are invloved.
For me emotional communication is actually easier in writing than any other medium. I got into a lot of problematic interactions growing up because of having so much difficulty communicating about anything emotionally "charged" in verbal format. :/
Also, just a random question: if I were to paint a picture for M could I mail it to her? I don't want to be "weird person on the Internet", but I have been wanting to try drawing some butterflies lately and it occurred to me that M might like that. :)
Thank you so much for responding to my comment and for commenting on my blog. Maizie would totally LOVE getting a picture you paint and I am sure she would enjoy sending you something as well.;)
I think what you have written on my blog and here in the comment section is very important and good information for parents of children with Autism and other special needs.
I would love to put the information you wrote into a blog post. Are you cool with that? I will probably write you via e-mail for a little interview thingy as well. Would you be willing to do the interview? I think your input is very valuable.
Marla: Yay! I have an idea for a picture that I will start working on this weekend. And yes, you can quote me or otherwise discuss my comment(s) in a post. Feel free to e-mail as well...do you have my email address still?
I dislike talking on the phone as well--for the obvious fact that I can't see their mouths and therefore have a much more difficult time understanding someone than if they were right in front of me. Nevertheless, I still occasionally call home because my parents like to chat with me in real time as opposed to via e-mail (which is my usual form of correspondance).
Something that has always struck me as rather funny is that while it's understandable that if I can't see your face my comprehension level has just dropped 6% (per sentence, which adds up very quickly!), my mother is the same way, even though her hearing is excellent. If I say something to my mother and my back is turned...well, comprehension goes down the tubes.
It was interesting to read this as compared to my brother's speaking skills--he's actually won some awards for his speechmaking ability, but has expressed a similar ambivalence about writing as you express about presenting.
I have a lot of words of which I know the meaning of relative to other words, but that I would be unable to give a textbook definition of. I always assumed that it was a quality relatively common in children who are unusually precocious readers ;)
On a related topic, there was a documentary about a year ago called "Through Deaf Eyes" that basically talked about the deaf experience in the United States. At one point, a man (I think he's an ASL professor at Gallaudet) talked about how his deaf mother could speak quite well, and was always regarded as "the smart one" in the family--his father's speaking ability was so-so. Then the man went to Gallaudent and majored in ASL, and when he came back home he was struck by how beautifully his father could sign, whereas his mother's signing ability was only adequate. I've always wondered what it would look like if a cognitive scientist took brain scans of their minds while they were signing and then while they were speaking...
indeed, so much about verbal communication is listener-dependent, largely beyond our control. no quick and accurate way that i know of to conversationally ping or run verbal cyclical redundancy checks for throughput integrity.
i might proposed the phrase "embedded context" for the phenomenon of using words or phrases that have specifically or uniquely ascribed meanings.
that said, it does seem that in any specific line of work or inquiry, lingo inevitably emerges. i think i'm what i'm saying is that "embedded context" is just a dressed up way to say "lingo."
as usual, i'm making this up as i go and presently i think that i do somewhat like the way "embedded context" sounds so stuffy and academically self-important.
it does seem to me that writing still can't be beat as a communication method for a trillion reasons that you already know and i which don't have time to itemize here right now, anyway.
writing does, however, require the willingness and ability to parse one's thoughts into potentially comprehensible modules and that is not a trivial skill. and it too is reader dependent.
even once we have various brain prosthetics, i suspect that the efficacy of sending channels will continue to be dependent upon recieving channels; perhaps moreso than ever. can't wait to experiment with 'em, in any case. :-)
your work is a wonderful gift to the world, anne. thank you.
I hope this post was not instigated by your interview at ImmInst, and me saying now that I loved it-you were great!-- would make you question my intent ;-) Not that you won't with my post anyway, I just wanted you to know that I question myself constantly too, and taped interviews I've given, I cringe to listen to.
BTW, I think I told you before that I wish I had a brain like yours, I'd trade social skills for analytical ability any day ;-)
Marla--I just noticed that your picture is a trick of the eye type picture (I forget what they're called off the top of my head--those face/vase type pictures). Cute ;)
Metavalent--I regularly find myself writing four page long papers that are basically debates with myself over various subjects. I don't share them with anyone (most of the time--I did share one paper I wrote with an online class I was in that discussed the role of women's and "disabled" rights in Peacemaking), but I just find them to be a helpful exercise in helping me to categorize and synthesize the information I have in my head but have never really organized. I'm trying to get into the habit of (whether for a casual eight-page monologue with myself or for an e-mail or whatever) of writing down all my arguments as they occur to me so that while I'm writing I don't forget about them. It's happened in the past!
But I agree that writing is the best was of communication for most people since (to our knowledge) the majority of people in western-based society seem to learn by reading and comprehending. My brother can remember whole passages of movies after hearing them two or three times and has an extraordinary oral memory (for a while in Middle School his way of saying bye-and-have-a-good-day was to recite the "One Ring" poem from the Lord of the Rings), and is also a promising rhetorician.
What I'm curious to know is if most people learn through a verbal context because they are able to adapt somewhat successfully from their preferred form of communication to that one, or because the majority of the population really does learn best through a verbal/reading context.
This comment is sort of in response to some of what has been written by various people here (as opposed to a point by point response to an individual).
One thing I didn't really get into in my post, but which is worth mentioning for sure, is that I am not just referring to a dichotomy between talking/listening and writing/reading here. Communication is a complex activity and process regardless of which medium is used, and different methods work better for different people depending on the situation.
I generally tend to prefer writing when expressing complex ideas, and am much more likely (and able) to express what I actually think/mean in writing than in speech, but as Metavalent noted, whether or not a written communication is understood depends very much on the reader.
Sometimes I feel that I have communicated something quite clearly in writing, only to have it misunderstood by someone. I have also found, interestingly, that there are some people online whose communications come across very clearly and straightforwardly to me, but which tend to be misinterpreted in similar ways by other readers who comment. This translates to real-time interaction to some extent as well -- e.g., there are some people whose actions are very communicative to me, whereas others seem quite inscrutable.
So while finding a medium that works best for you in a given circumstance is certainly a component of communicative success, it's also important to recognize that different perceptual/cognitive styles, as well as the background knowledge or preconceptions someone has regarding a given subject, will come into play as well. One thing I am realizing more and more as I get older (in fact, mostly over the past 2 years or so) is how significant "shared context" can be as far as making communication more successful. Like, if someone has seen the same movies you have, it becomes possible for the two of you to quote back and forth and say things that would sound like total non-sequitirs to someone who hasn't seen those movies, but which can end up communicating more than "just" commenting on a situation without a reference would be.
Also, Shannon: This post was indeed somewhat inspired by my thoughts surrounding the interview thing, but certainly not by anything you said.
Though I must admit that the questions about whether genetic engineering was comparable to things like taking prenatal vitamins while pregnant (not in those exact terms, but I think that was the general idea of what was being expressed) threw me for a bit of a loop.
As I (thankfully) managed to express in the interview at least to some degree, there is so much of a tendency for people to rush to categorize anyone who comments on that subject into either "pro-technology" or "anti-technology" that my saying anything on the subject without extensive background explanation risks making my entire communication pointless.
I sometimes feel like, in such discussions, I am being backed into a corner wherein my only accessible options are to either "admit" that it is obviously better for some kinds of people to exist than others (as evidenced by the everyday decisions people make regarding prenatal care, etc.) or insist on "irrationally" defending "diversity" in some way that is going to get me pegged as overly sentimental and pandering to political correctness. I don't think you personally do this, but I've been in numerous conversations where people have.
And I'm still not sure how to deal with it, especially in the verbal context. Which makes me very leery of even trying to discuss some subjects verbally, because of (as I said in my post) the tendency of many people to take verbal communication as more indicative of what someone "really thinks" than written communication, which in my case might lead people to oversimplify my views tremendously.
I would say that in that particular interview, my brain-to-mouth connection was "moderately OK", meaning that I said a fair bit of stuff I actually meant, but that in some areas I really didn't have adequate language, and hence got a bit tangential and hesitant.
I also think I said some things that were insufficiently balanced/qualified by corresponding points -- e.g., I really had wanted to emphasize the fact that there was nothing particularly "special" about longevity medicine, as all of medicine is technically geared toward saving lives to begin with, but I don't think I managed to convey the necessary emphasis. And I think it's really important for serious longevity advocates to acknowledge that, as sometimes it seems to me that people forget this basic fact, which leads them to see longevity medicine as more "oppressed" than it actually is. I mean, of course it's ridiculous for people like Francis Fukuyama to sit there saying that everyone has a duty to die by a certain age, and it's fine to speak out against that, but my guess is that much of that talk is really empty posturing. If effective longevity medicine actually existed, it would just be something normal people went for at a certain age, like mammography or something -- and you can bet that the same people going on about its supposed drawbacks now would be lining up for it the same as the rest of us.
Wow, okay, that was a bit tangential right there. :)
Hah! Tangential ;-) You empathize with other's concerns about "transhumanist minded people" thinking themselves better than others, or that only the rich will benefit from life extension etc. I don't as much, as I see similar trends throughout history--the educated or the wealthy benefiting at first, but said wisdom or technology spreading around the world. Certainly there are great problems of inequality still, pockets of extreme poverty--I take, probably purely from optimism, the view that our technology and intelligence can help solve some of our problems.
But it is quite a yin, yang... one could go back and forth all day, and there is merit to what philosophers and scholars do--for me the heroes are those that are doing the volunteering, those that are supporting the current non-profits helping to end inequality--and are supporting our scientists views of how the future could be, and help usher it in in a positive manner, at the same time. :-)
Interestingly enough, I have a better time talking in person, than I do with writing--probably because I can read how the other person is taking the information I'm giving, better--if they like it, if I need to ask questions, or change my topic etc... easier to tailor the message.
I don't know how much attention you pay to the lefty news source Alternet, but here's an article you might be interested in reading:
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/92709/
pretty offensive, by any definition of the word.
I prefer writing to speaking too, the problem is that I have a well-documented (I'm sure you've noticed) tendency to ramble ;)
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