What do you do when you don't understand? In a classroom setting, it can be embarrassing to ask a teacher to repeat something you fear everybody understood besides you. But let's say you ask and they repeat. What do you do if you still don't understand the second time? And the third?
For the sake of social normalcy, I hope that all of you have had the experience of Socially Awkward Penguin. If you're at all like me, this is actually just about as common as understanding something on the first try. So what do you do?
Our brains are trained to pick up clues in what people say (or don't say) that hint at meaning. To one level or another, we're all psychologists and linguists. We naturally interpret speech patterns and writing patterns. For many of us, we don't even really notice when anything is off at first. Our brains just fix the problem. I get kind of tired of these posts popping up on Facebook every day, but this is what I'm talking about:
As it says in the message, we don't actually read every letter anyway, and I'm sure we don't even listen to every word either, especially not prepositions (in, on, of, etc.) and conjunctions (and, but, so). Brains have to process a lot of information, and I'm sure that our brains could read every letter and listen to every word, but it has learned that there are far more efficient ways to operate. So it seems that our brains' communicative functions run mostly on context. SO when we haven't paid attention to what is actually being said or the context in which it's presented, that's when we get into trouble. In my case, there are many times when I forget what I said or what the topic at hand is at all, so when I hear somebody's response, it's just noise. But after I process and remember what I last heard, I rework the response in my mind and figure out what the noises meant to communicate. It might just be that my brain is wacky, but I've seen other people with the same look I think I have when I have to go back and contextualize a comment.
Hopefully after contextualizing a statement, we can figure out what's going on. But if even then we don't get it, we still have to contextualize the situation as a whole to know how to respond. I mean, we could just say that we still don't understand, but that's awkward, can be interpreted as rude (or racist in some cases), and takes more effort than we really want to give. So we gauge everything—mannerisms, posture, gestures, mood, etc.—before we select a safe, non-specific answer like, "Uh huh."
Alright, so this is the way we are (at least the way I see us), but we also know that humans are fragile. We have issues. We're a confusing, flawed people. So what happens when we use those amazing brains of ours and come to the wrong conclusion? Misunderstandings can be hilarious, especially in the above-mentioned new favorite video:
Bad Lip Reading and the people behind it are geniuses. But like all comedy, there is an element of truth to it: we so often form our own interpretations of something, and we can be drastically incorrect. Just a minor alteration of sound, word, spelling, or movement can transform our good intentions into insults, incoherent comments, or empty insights.
So I guess the moral is this: be careful with what you say and what you choose to hear. Don't jump to hasty contextual conclusions, and be patient with people as they try to understand or re-explain. When people speak, give them the gift of your attention. Try to understand what people really mean. And above all, watch out for the chicken-duck-woman thing in the bushes! (If you don't understand that, you haven't watched the video yet. What's wrong with you?)
Here's a great talk about how just a slight alteration can lead to drastic changes:
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