Aside: The Magic of Human Communication

The thoughts that I, as a speaker, wish to share with you, as a listener, are expressed as words.  Syntactically (not synaptically) organized phonemes travel as sound waves, slightly faster than a thousand feet per second, to be heard by you and interpreted, either subconsciously or consciously.

Knowing how this happens, it is downright miraculous that verbal communication works as well as it does.

Fortunately, you had a pretty good idea of what I was going to say well before you actually heard my words.  Can you guess what is being communicated between the silhouetted characters, just by the nature of their body language?

Photons traveling at nearly a billion feet per second previewed for you my mood, my confidence, my congruence/truthfulness, etc., all unconsciously expressed by my body’s language.  You registered this unconsciously, as well, because neither of us can think fast enough to process vision intentionally.

Unconscious visual communication tells volumes, and our subconscious hearing of intonation tells a lot more.  Of least significance are the actual words we consciously hear and interpret.  Unfortunately, we are trained in school, and often by our parents, to give disproportionate attention to the words we hear and, therefore, most of us give short-shrift to what we intuit from non-verbal communication.

While some of us overlook body language, a few capitalize on it; guess who has more advantages?

Reading and understanding written words, without the augmentation of intonation and body language, requires the reader to possess a powerfully-focused, intentional consciousness.  Sadly, few people nowadays read comprehensive material, such as presented here in this blog-book.  (That makes you SPECIAL! 😉 )

On the other hand, video games are quite popular.  Can you guess why?  Deftly playing video games is physically automated (unconscious), intensely impulse-driven (emotionally addicting) and mentally formulaic (minimally intentional).

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