Communication on all levels

When we are young it is incredibly easy to make major mistakes in our perception of others, but within this perception are the seeds of an issue that can continue to show up.

I believe there is imperfection in perception.  My misinterpretation of a teacher’s quote aged 14, is an early mistake in “encoding” and “decoding.” Encoding and decoding are just fancy talk for the complicated interaction that is communication, and how they’re related to something called the confirmation bias.  When I read those words on the board aged 14, the words on the board spoke to me in a way that I thought was universal: my fourteen-year-old brain knew exactly what they meant.

When words are spoken or written on board, the intention of the communicator can easily get lost in the understanding. When I say something to you, I’m encoding information that I want to communicate; I’m trying to get you to understand me.  The trouble comes I believe when we forget that each person understands or decides information differently, we hear what we know, we hear what we want and above all else we hear what makes sense based on our life thus far. 

This variability in perception happens because each of us views the world through a slightly different lens.
What the word “love” means to me could be different than what it means to you; for example, what has the word “love” meant to you in the past? Has it been controlling or unconditional, loaded with expectations or adoration?

The actual words we use are simply a jumping off place, and then they’re strung together in beads of sentences that can appear a different color to each person listening. The colors or actual meaning we assign to words vary because all of us do; and because our minds are expert categorizers, we often understand things in a way that already makes sense with our existent worldview.

It’s for this reason that two people can read the same news article and come away with different interpretations, or feel entirely different about the events going on in the world: We tend to pay attention to information that confirms what we already believe to be true, and disregard the rest of what we see. It’s not due to callousness either; it’s just the way that we’re wired.

Our brains are really good at simplifying and organizing. In order to cognitively make sense of a complicated and busy world, we have to become expert categorizers. This is adaptive, and it helps our overworked brains make sense of things, issues only occur when we forget that the way we’ve organized the world is different than the way that others have; when we assume that each person interprets the world and its events the way that we do.

If everyone could mean something different when they say “I love you” or “let’s go get some ice cream” then how on earth are we ever supposed to understand each other? Is all social coherence lost?  The answer is simple: We must keep an open and incredibly present mind.

We all perceive the world that we live in differently, which is why keeping an open mind is important.  It’s remembering that when we read or listen, we are decoding at the same time, trying to understand and make sense of information, all through our limited worldview.  It’s being patient when we feel misunderstood, and allowing for the possibility that we’re also misunderstanding others.

Open-mindedness is being forgiving of people who hold different opinions and reminding ourselves that we’ve really only ever been one person; we don’t necessarily know what the world is like for others.

It’s an extremely complicated world that we all attempt to navigate daily, and there are benefits to the assumptions we jump to minute by minute. But in order to sift through assumptions we’ve first got to be aware of them, and that involves being vigilant of our own minds as often as possible. It involves pausing, taking a breath, and asking ourselves: What is this person talking about?