The feeling of discourse

An MRI study reveals that emotion, not fact-sharing, promotes social interaction and facilitates interpersonal understanding. What researchers discovered is that emotions ‘synchronize mental networks’ between individuals. Synchronized network activity focuses attention on shared experience and produces a common framework for understanding. Sharing other people’s emotional state during discourse enables us to perceive, experience and interpret what others say in a like manner ..without separation [ link ].

Inference making

“Your job as a reader is to use your imagination and analytical skills where the author has left off.”

Intentional fallacy: it’s not what an author means to say that’s important ..it’s how the reader interprets what they say. What they intended is subject to interpretation, which isn’t necessarily going to turn out the same. But if we’re the readers, our interpretation is what matters. Communication is mostly an interpretive process. We add our perspective and ingenuity to whatever we hear or read. Attempts by the writer to narrow it down are futile ..or sterile [link]. In Harry Potter, some may see Dumbledore as gay; others might view him as quirky and without a particular sexual identity. I'm reminded of the ghost in “Hamlet” and how little we really know about him. Is he the spirit of his murdered father asking to be avenged ..? Is he a hellish apparition sent to make Hamlet commit murder ..? Or, is he just a figment of Hamlet's imagination ..? And who really gives a shit now what Shakespeare meant ..?

Synthesizing minds

At a graduate seminar many years ago, a fellow student named David Stoltenberg proposed a theory that said that the simple act of reading is a “cross-sensory” event in the brain ..he even had a name for it ..“sensory synesthesia” ..which he described as “perceiving the sound of a color ..or the light of a sigh.” He was giving a multi-media presentation to demonstrate this idea ..but it didn’t turn out the way he planned ..the projectors malfunctioned ..the main point got lost ..and what I was able to get out of it left me feeling unconvinced ..it sounded too much like science fiction. When I think back, I realize I owe Dave a big apology ..and a pound of red Lebanese ..he was right ..you have to be able to “hear” what you “see” in order “understand” what you “read”.

Research now shows that synesthesia, far from being a “fringe” phenomenon, can actually enhance cognitive function in addition to being part of the reading process. Many notable artists, poets and novelist are thought to have this ability. The condition occurs from increased communication between sensory areas of the brain [link]. It probably lies on a spectrum of the way we normally perceive and experience the world. In other words, we all have it ..just some more than others [link].

Network theory of communication

I have a theory that says whenever messages are transmitted between people in different locations; the accuracy of communication drops by 60%. I call it the ‘displacement theory of communication’ and it's an extension of findings in the field of human information-processing [link].

This drop in communication is wide-scale and can occur anywhere from cell phones to air traffic control systems. Messages are by nature incomplete and often assume knowledge of local conditions that aren’t available to the receiver. Without exacting protocols, like those developed in the air traffic control industry, incomplete messages are at best probabilistic and rely on the receiver to supply the most likely meaning intended. Since this is an innate function of human information-processing; it can happen quickly and imperceptibly. When it does, we are prone to making overconfident and faulty decisions about the most likely meaning intended. It has long been know that the most frequent decision we make during conversation is about the intention of others .. it’s also the one we get wrong most often. So, facebook users and text messagers ..beware! We are making the rules up as we go.

Reading behavior

When I make a conscious effort, I can kind of catch a glimpse of whatever’s going on inside my head that helps me grasp the meaning of what I’m reading and relate it to other things I know about. It may be part of my training, but ..what I’m seeing is not unique to me. It is a process that’s common to everyone. It’s universal. It’s been observed and documented by linguists all over the world. As I read, I’m building an ‘event-chain’. An event-chain is made up of information from prior-sentences, which I get from working-memory, and prior-experience, which I get from long-term memory. When I read about the rebel invasion of Tripoli this week, I immediately built a relatively simple event-chain based on a limited set of events stored in long-term memory. It looked something like this:

However, as I read further ..I discovered this was not the case. The invasion was the result of Kadafi’s own undoing. Now my event-chain looks something like this:

Suddenly NATO air strikes don’t seem quite so important anymore. My first reading was in error. It doesn’t take into account a whole heap of events I didn’t know about. My second event-chain probably doesn’t either. However, I still come away with the feeling that I’m sufficiently informed, which leads to something else I’ve noticed: I struggle with yielding to the probability of the unknown, which is always greater than what I can fit into an event-chain. However, an event-chain is about all that I can fit into my pea-brain.

Miguel Aguilar

Miguel Aguilar has been recognized as one of the most effective teachers in the L.A. unified school district. By devising a method of his own for teaching reading and language skills, he moved his students from the bottom 30% in the district to well above average. When they looked at what he was doing, they found he wasn’t simply ‘teaching to the test’. He broke the material down and prompted students to identify narrative components while they read. For instance, he would frequently stop and ask them questions about the goals and actions of the characters. He Then did something interesting. He would ask the class if they understood what kind of information he was looking for. Example: was it an inference about the character’s intention or a prediction about the consequences of their action. He wasn’t just teaching them to read the narrative explicitly ..but how to process the narrative implicitly [link]. I’ve heard people refer to this as the ‘meta’ or ‘pragmatic’ levels of comprehension. Studies show that when students start doing this on a regular basis, they become more active participants in what they previously considered to be a passive activity .. and reading scores improve dramatically [link].