4 ms·

Wouldn't your hypothesis undermine research that suggests the important pieces of communication are non-verbal(7% words, 38% tone, 55% body language...roughly d

by mym1990 5y ago

Wouldn't your hypothesis undermine research that suggests the important pieces of communication are non-verbal(7% words, 38% tone, 55% body language...roughly depending on which research you use). Also, I don't see a way to actively separate information and emotion while someone is communicating to you while still being able to fully understand...that would just mean you are not paying attention to at least one of the signals...but maybe that IS what is happening when people pay more attention to body language and tone over the actual content.

munificent 5y ago
We don't have good words for talking about this stuff (ironically), but I didn't intend to imply that the emotional aspect was less important than informational. Maybe "logical" would have been a better word for the latter. It's all information. Perhaps a better way to think of the split is that some of the audio content needs to be processed deliberately and sequentially—it has grammatical structure, words that need to be decoded, semantics, etc. It requires processing from the part of our brain that needs to deliberately pay attention to things. It's like reading or doing math. Meanwhile, some of it can be processed more intuitively. It's where we pick up tone and emotional intent. We will absorb that even if we don't deliberately focus on it—you can tell that someone is angry when they speak even if you don't know their language. Of course, understanding both of those requires integrating them together. The lexical content of their speech might tell you why they feel a certain way or what they feel that way about. But one way to look at music is that it's a sound artifact designed to deliberately convey "I'm almost all non-grammatical, it's OK to not focus on me." Again, of course, this is all pure conjecture.
gjygj 5y ago
> important pieces of communication are non-verbal That can't possibly be true for actual information (in the Shannon sense). When you say to someone "go to the grocery store and buy a soda", these words can't be just 7% of the total information. Or put another way, what exactly do you communicate in the other 93% (13 times more information)
- sseagull 5y ago
  Hard to quantify, but how that sentence is said and the corresponding body language dramatically changes the meaning. Is the person smiling? Yelling? Pointing angrily? Making a motion like they are thirsty? Making puppy eyes? Laughing like it is an inside joke? It can change from a mere friendly request to a demand possibly backed up by violence.
  - gjygj 5y ago
    Sure, but how many bits of information are in those modifiers you mentioned? Maybe you can modulate it in 200 different ways? Surely way less than in the actual sentence, since you have millions of different posibilities for the words: go/store/soda
    - mym1990 5y ago
      I think you’re missing out on the almost infinite possibilities of how body language and tone can give off different moods or intentions of a person. But these cues aren’t often processed in a literal sense, our brain can pick things up without us knowing exactly why something is wrong or different, it just is. It’s very intuitive based I think.
      - gjygj 5y ago
        In that case a transcript of a conversation would be almost worthless since it's depriving us of the body language or the tone.
        mym1990 5y ago
        Yes, I would say if you gave me a random transcript of a conversation, it would be pretty worthless without any additional context. We are talking about active communication here, not a record of communication happening at some point in time.
- mym1990 5y ago

munificent 5y ago

We don't have good words for talking about this stuff (ironically), but I didn't intend to imply that the emotional aspect was less important than informational. Maybe "logical" would have been a better word for the latter. It's all information. Perhaps a better way to think of the split is that some of the audio content needs to be processed deliberately and sequentially—it has grammatical structure, words that need to be decoded, semantics, etc. It requires processing from the part of our brain that needs to deliberately pay attention to things. It's like reading or doing math. Meanwhile, some of it can be processed more intuitively. It's where we pick up tone and emotional intent. We will absorb that even if we don't deliberately focus on it—you can tell that someone is angry when they speak even if you don't know their language. Of course, understanding both of those requires integrating them together. The lexical content of their speech might tell you why they feel a certain way or what they feel that way about. But one way to look at music is that it's a sound artifact designed to deliberately convey "I'm almost all non-grammatical, it's OK to not focus on me." Again, of course, this is all pure conjecture.

gjygj 5y ago

> important pieces of communication are non-verbal That can't possibly be true for actual information (in the Shannon sense). When you say to someone "go to the grocery store and buy a soda", these words can't be just 7% of the total information. Or put another way, what exactly do you communicate in the other 93% (13 times more information)

sseagull 5y ago
Hard to quantify, but how that sentence is said and the corresponding body language dramatically changes the meaning. Is the person smiling? Yelling? Pointing angrily? Making a motion like they are thirsty? Making puppy eyes? Laughing like it is an inside joke? It can change from a mere friendly request to a demand possibly backed up by violence.
- gjygj 5y ago
  Sure, but how many bits of information are in those modifiers you mentioned? Maybe you can modulate it in 200 different ways? Surely way less than in the actual sentence, since you have millions of different posibilities for the words: go/store/soda
  - mym1990 5y ago
    I think you’re missing out on the almost infinite possibilities of how body language and tone can give off different moods or intentions of a person. But these cues aren’t often processed in a literal sense, our brain can pick things up without us knowing exactly why something is wrong or different, it just is. It’s very intuitive based I think.
    - gjygj 5y ago
      In that case a transcript of a conversation would be almost worthless since it's depriving us of the body language or the tone.
      - mym1990 5y ago
        Yes, I would say if you gave me a random transcript of a conversation, it would be pretty worthless without any additional context. We are talking about active communication here, not a record of communication happening at some point in time.
mym1990 5y ago