Pecha Kucha 4/5 : The Power and Weakness of Words

Slide 4:

 

Words are terrific, really. If I tell you go to Wittgenstein's house, here's the address, and when you get there, his is the BLUE door, you're set. You've got no questions, you nod, and when you arrive you knock on the correct door.

Slide 5:

But that doesn't mean that the word BLUE is going to always be so helpful. Plato says there is an ideal BLUE out there, but sometimes it's just not that simple, and with a whole host of competing stimuli that all meet the inadequate criteria "is blue," then our minds cannot find that comforting certainty.

Pecha Kucha 2/3 of 20: Hardwired to Simplify

In the first slide I talked about how we humans tend to leap at conclusions (where “at” implies a little less accuracy than leaping “to” conclusions) in conversation, taking words we hear and say and assuming their meaning is absolute.

Here’s slide 2:

We are happy when things are really clear. Shallow rapid processing, snap decisions, black and white.

Grey areas require more processing and contemplation and are therefore not easy, they have no nice edges. Where does black stop being black, and when is it really white? Hard for our minds to figure that out.

These color words are a good example of how we gravitate to definite meanings, and how we describe things that are ambiguous – looking for edges and sometimes not finding them.

Slide 3:

We have had this ability of rapid shallow processing for a long time. Plato was a deep thinker and wondered about it. He suggested there were ideal “Forms” that existed independently that our minds accessed so we could compare reality against them, resulting in recognition and confidence. Clever. We see a chair, compare it to the Form, it's a match (but never as pure).

 

Pecha Kucha 1 of 20: Two Misperceptions about Communicating

Well, I'll tell you, twenty slides of twenty seconds apiece is quite a challenge if you try to say too much (more info on "Pecha Kucha"  or ペチャクチャ here). At several points I felt like Doctor Who running around gesturing like a madman and speaking a thousand words a minute. It went well however and I enjoyed it, the high-speed transfer of information. Maybe that'll just have to be my style, although I think I can get to the point quicker with practice.

At the time of this blog entry then, I've presented "Grains of Sand" once. Slide one:

Two diagrams, completely symbolic, representing two key misperceptions we have when communicating.

The first, when I speak, I'm certain that the other person hearing me knows exactly what I meant.

And the second, when they speak to me, I'm certain that I understand exactly what they meant.

We understand, but only to an imperfect degree, which is usually but not always sufficient for communication to be considered successful.