Partner Article

Why communication is so difficult

In the late 1950s Noam Chomsky completed his Ph.D. thesis Transformational Grammar. In it he explained that there are three processes by which people make sense of the world; Deletions, Distortions and Generalisations. These processes help us to create reality as we perceive it – because that’s all reality ever is – our perception.

Our perceptions are limited by the amount of information we can hold in our awareness at one moment in time. The American psychologist George Miller wrote a paper in 1956 that stated that we can only handle “seven, plus or minus two” bits of information at any one time and that we delete the rest.

It is interesting to note what different people delete or retain – this is one of the factors that make us all so unique. What is it that you filter in or filter out of your awareness in any given context?

For example: Someone walks over to you right now and gives you a kiss on the lips. This leads to a very interesting and complex series of processes that mainly occur beyond your conscious awareness:

You have the experience of being kissed.

You have a number of sensations as you feel the contact of their lips upon yours, you may hear the sound or their breathing, smell their perfume or aftershave, taste their lips, see them or some other image in your mind’s eye if you have closed your eyes, hormones will be released and you will generate an emotional response.

You make meaning from those sensations.

You automatically find words to describe and understand the pictures, sounds, feelings, taste and smells.

Finally you make meaning from those words.

By the time you have created a meaning for the words you choose, you have exercised a number of generalisations, distortions and deletions. You will have generalised what a kiss means, comparing it with other kisses you have had, and the appropriateness of kissing in this particular context. You will have deleted many of the sensations you experienced because you will be aligning them to the meaning you have given the kiss. You will also have distorted what you experienced to align with the meaning. This could be anything from the pleasurable feelings of being loved or aroused, or feelings of anger and disgust at your personal space being invaded. What happens when you attempt to describe your experience to someone else? How much do you think they really understand?

…And you can catch me at the North East Expo Newcastle Falcons Stadium, Kingston Park on Wednesday 16th April 2014 where I will be talking about hypnotic selling and how to identify the below conscious buying signals.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Matt Hudson .