Signals

I often think it is a miracle that humans manage to communicate at all other than in ways such as fighting, fleeing or mating. There probably are other primal urges but I did not do PU 101. It's not that we don't try to communicate. We are awash with all manner of signals, texts, stuff that is supposed to convey what is in the mind of one human to the mind of another. In most jobs you rarely have time to think about whether the signal you send is likely to hit the mark (whatever that means). But when you combine our capacity for signalling with our deep need to make sense of much of our world then things get pretty interesting.

There are those who are magnificent signallers. This does not necessarily mean that they signal accurately or in a sophisticated manner, rather that they manage to provoke/evoke responses in large numbers of those who pick up the signal. I'm guessing teaching is a bit like that. Good teachers signal in ways that do provoke/evoke and any other oke's you can think of. People speak of great communicators but i figure that is attributing way too much to the signaller. Good signaller I can agree to. But this tricky C word, like the tricky L word (L for learning) is something that does not bear close scrutiny.

So what we do in the face of all of this. We perform communication, act like it is happening. In fact, we have little to no idea what is going on in the minds around us other than our own and even then we might be suspicious of what the so-called conscious lets us listen in on. We are very good though, most of the time, at "reading" other bodies: thier eyes, hands movements, body positioning and so on. Not an exact science by any means but this is stuff that is rehearsed over and over so we respond without the need to process mcuh other than the signal occurred. The fun part always is when we take our little stock of "readings" and apply them to a person we have never met. Well we have to start somewhere! All such fun. I think I prefer the bounce theory I was writing about some time back.