Banter 81: How exactly does verbal and visual communication succeed as well as fail in imparting messages between people?

Or more simply, How does verbal and visual / non-verbal communication work (or not work)?

When: Thursday, May 29th at 6pm

Where: Bonsai Brewery, outdoor picnic tables, in Whitefish

Prep materials to read ahead of time so we are all sort of on the same page or drawing from some similar reference points:

From Isaac: https://phys.org/news/2025-04-words-hidden-musical-grammar-natural.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawJ2eMJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHpxtb5-_829FiiTRcn-nGGd12IxZEbn8hUrfk08qkNzX8VTMCmCdAkiI9FLg_aem_HE9PQKHxwQTEYsd4fxO9mA&sfnsn=mo

From Sabine:

1. This is a fun, short article about communication between species that a friend of mine wrote & I edited a while back when "X" was still "Twitter":   https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/the_real_twitter_feed_that_we_have_lost_track_of/##

2. This is a video with Noam Chomsky going over concepts of language is some interesting ways: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hdUbIlwHRkY&t=801s

3. This is another video getting into signs, signifieds, and signifiers, which builds in useful ways from the Chomsky overview, since this is getting us into more particulars of linguistics and how we communicate with speech, written words, symbols, acting things out, etc: https://youtu.be/0JtJu9HdQVM?feature=shared

         a. I really wanted to also bridge this to the next step which is Derrida, deconstruction, unstable meanings, differánce (only knowing definitions by what things are not, but not really by what they are), but am restraining myself. It is so cool though & one of my favorite things to teach grad students. I definitely don't believe in stable meanings & find it funny how often people seem to be so sure footed that anyone is going to know what they mean or that they are going to know what I/anyone else mean/s.

         b. Then there was an article about psychosis, Derrida concepts, and the inability to overlook instability of meanings (which is apparently required for us to be "normal"), so that's also super interesting if we all applied Derrida to every convo we had - wouldn't go so well. No need to read that, but if you want to, it's linked here.

5. Poems work for me a lot better than most things people verbally (or via writing) say in sentences or paragraphs, as far as me getting the meaning much more fully, and likewise I think it's easier to say what I mean via a poem or via poetic prose or some other more visual means. A normal sentence (especially spoken) falls short of what I would have meant every single time.

a.  “In a Station of a Metro" by Ezra Pound (poem in full): 

The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.

b. A haiku by Mizuta Masahide, 17th-century Japanese poet:

Barn's burnt down --

now

I can see the moon.

From Lavonne: 

A short article on the impacts of silent communication:

https://psychcentral.com/relationships/silent-communication#benefits

Kind of from Collette (related to some of the ideas she was explaining last banter, which led us to this topic): 

From Jivan:

As mammals we are always using our brains to process all the inputs around us.  That is the way we survived.  Humans tend to automatically embellish the input with thoughts such as subject, object and stories.    

Success and Failure of Visual Communication. 

The input might be something you pick up with your eyes (as well as the 4 other senses).  The success of visual communication is that direct thoughts inspire direct action.  When our ancestors saw a tiger the ancestor said, “It’s a tiger. Run.”  Look at Picasso’s Guernica.  Or Van Gogh’s Starry Night.  They make you want to directly do something.   The failure is that sometimes our ancestors died anyway, and ugliness is very difficult to get rid of.    

Success and Failure of Verbal Communication

The input might be a verbal memory from your brain (in written or sound form).  It always refers to a complicated construct or story and always misses the boat.  “That is a beautiful person.  I love or hate her, him, they”.  Or “Make America Great Again”.  The verbiage becomes part of a narrative that you have already stored in your subconscious.  It becomes an addiction.  Not only is the narrative itself addictive,  but getting what you think you want is also addictive.  It is a constant story in your mind that keeps repeating itself.  It causes stress.  The communication triggers both subject and object.  The success of verbal communication is that technology has improved.  The failure is that we are always on the brink of war.  We tend to think the story is real.  We get stuck in our minds.  We feel stressed.  It causes destruction of our environment.  It overvalues money.

THE  MIND

It takes about 500 msec before we begin to process whatever happens in the “here and now”.  At that time the inputs pass through the 6 gates, and we become aware of the thing.  This is the beginning of perception.  At this point we can go to sleep and grasp at thoughts that come up.  Or we can stay awake to whatever arises.  In Sleep we react.  In Awakeness we savor whatever experience we are having.  Meditation is a skill to learn so that we can control our experience rather than being limited to our concepts about it.  We learn to dance with Sleep, the conditioned overprotective conceptual framework.  Here is a diagram about this:            

—--------------------------------TIME—--------------------------------------->

                               

Inputs                       l               A.  Awakeness (a human trait)

                                l                    Non-conceptual                                       

Percept (raw feel)      l                    Savoring and Calm

                                l                    Ornamentation 

Grasping                  l                               Bliss

                             Brain                           Luminosity

6 Gates                  fires                            Joy

     touch                 at

     smell                 500                            

     taste                 msec.        B.  Sleep (a robotic trait)

     thought                                    Conceptual (Cognition)

     sight                                                Agitated 

     sound                                              Labeling

                                                     Construction of identity, “I” and “it”

                                                     Reactivity

Jivan