Are Women BETTER Communicators Than Men — Or Is It Just Talk?
This is Click Bait and This is How it Works
If you did get irritated. I am sorry.
But it was to show you how your brain works and how media hijacks your brain.
It is not your fault.
If you read the subtitle that is clickbait then you most likely did not get upset. That is because the emotion blocks any information other than that making you even more angry.
Which is the left hemisphere of your brain. The part of the brain that is dogmatic and never wrong.
But let us start with the written language when discussing communication and how we read text.
Reading text
You are not aware of how you are reading this very text.
It might be hard to believe that you are missing a lot of my typos when you read my text. But you do and I have a lot of typos. According to Ken Goodman, Peter H. Fries, and Steven L. Strauss in their book “Reading — The Grand Illusion”
“The idea that accurate reading is an illusion may be strange considering most of us were taught that accurate reading is necessary for comprehension.”
“To understand how we make sense of print you need to understand that the idea that you read every word is an illusion.”
But what you are doing is jumping from the first letter to the 15th letter and so on when you read. Stop and count the number of letters on each row. It is about 80 letters on each row because humans read the fastest with 80 letters on each row on average.
About 80 letters on each line and your eyes jump in an arch from the first letter on each line to the 15 letter to the 30th letter and so on o which Elizabeth R. Schotter explains very well in her research. That is why Medium has formatted this layout the way they have to maximize legibility
That is why legibility is correlated with short sentences.
Humans then read 238 English words per minute silently and 183 words per minute aloud according to Marc Brysbaert.
In User Experience design we know from the research that people only read for 6 seconds, the six-second rule, according to the research from Géry d’Ydewalle but also Agnieszka Szarkowska. That is why, today, you need to clickbait your titles to elicit an emotion.
In your eye, you have a blind spot where your eye nerve goes out of the back of the eye. You are perfectly blind there. What your brain does is fill in the blanks to recreate reality. So the left side of your brain assumes to fill in the blanks. That is why you jump to conclusions using an already mapped-out mental model of your world. It is also why you need to read a text more than once.
But that is also why you do not change your opinion about things easily. Because the left side of your brain forces you back into simplification to save energy or sugar in your brain. Try and change the mind of a person who uses Anti-Vaxers into understanding how their belief system is completely false.
Good luck with that! The probability you will succeed is slim to none.
As Ken Goodman, Peter H. Fries, and Steven L. Strauss in their book “Reading — The Grand Illusion”
“Just because we believe we have made sense does not mean that this is always the case. The sense we make depends on prior knowledge (what we knew before).”
If you are a perfectionist who hates typos. Please seek help. It is not good for you or others around you. Understand that you are just a human being. Please also read the book “Reading — The Grand Illusion”.
But what is communication?
Communicating is understanding
Verbal communication is the map of how you see the world around you.
That is why it is simple to understand people if you listen to them while staying silent. When you speak your left side of the brain conveys information that is in turn received in a way as to reach a common understanding. It comes from either the right listening side of the other person's brain or the dogmatic, simplistic stupid left side of the brain that does not know how to be wrong.
The spoken word is produced in your left brain hemisphere solely. Because the right side brain does not speak.
It listens to understand between the lines.
If you are only talking aloud it is called having a monolog and it does not imply that people are listening or receiving what you are trying to communicate. Sort of writing articles on Medium that no one reads.
When two people talk to each other they are having a dialog where both talk and receive information that is conveyed by the other and vice versa.
I know this sounds banal but please stay with me.
A monolog and dialog do not mean they are communicating with one another receiving information to reach the common ground or to, wait for it, cooperate, and understand each other. Nor does an argument increase communication as much as it angers people into verbal aggression.
We might state that talking is an effort to communicate but with more or less success rate. It should be mentioned that the right side of the brain also listens to you when you are talking. So while you are talking you are also receiving your speech and can reflect using your right hemisphere to understand what you just said.
You must remember once or twice in your life where you said something completely stupid. Only to hear yourself publicly and only then realise how stupid that sounded.
So what defines successful communication since communication seems not to declare a positive outcome but a spectrum of outcomes?
I think we can agree that if the information is received properly and understood in its entirety it is successful communication.
Eddo Rigotti and Andrea Rocci give this explanation:
“Constitutive context becomes relevant at the level of the speech act in its double role of defining the conditions of meaningfulness of the speech act and constituting the target on which the speech act operates effecting a change in the intersubjective reality. At this level communication context is eminently a social notion.”
Being a social human being
By understanding someone else's trial and error in their way of communicating.
You can be more or less successful in helping the other person be understood. That would imply that you the receiver of the written or verbal language is part of the problem or solution when someone is trying to communicate with you.
But it is also a left or right brain problem which I will address later in this article.
Listening seems to be as much part of successful communication if not more, than verbalizing words or writing them.
I have personally listened to thousands upon thousands of people. I had to listen to summarize what they said for them to acknowledge that it was in fact what they said during the 50 minutes they talked. Yes if you focus on the other person, completely void of yourself, you can understand them much better.
Because you have zero importance when another person speaks.
Let me repeat that. You as a person have no relevance to anything when the other person is speaking. Only the one speaking has relevance when they speak. Learn to silence your brain and press your lips together to not utter a single word.
Easier said than done.
I was put to the test when I had to communicate with a deaf person. He was from another country with a different language so by focusing solely on the elderly man.
I could communicate with him successfully with a piece of paper and a pen. I did not know sign language and he wrote in another language.
It was the right hemisphere of the brain that helped me come up with a way to communicate with the deaf man.
Because without using my right hemisphere I could never have helped the poor man.
The left and right hemispheres of your brain are the culprits
According to Doctor and Professor Iain McGilchrist.
Your left side of the brain controls your right hand and leg and most people are right-handed and right-footed. The central spinal cord goes in the opposite direction at the base of your skull. The left arm and leg are connected to the right side of your brain and vice versa. Just like the image your eyes see is up side down smack in the middle of the back of your head.
Surrounded by all the brain cells that listen to sounds from your ears.
If you have ever heard about the Dunning-Kruger Effect you know that the less knowledged a person is the more confident they are they know everything about a subject. That is how your entire left side of your brain works. It thinks it knows everything and is never wrong. It simplifies your life to saves your energy. Most of the dictionary is in your left hemisphere. But your right hemisphere has a large lexicon of abstract words. The left hemisphere has a much more complex syntax than the right just like a computer or machine.
But there are some syntaxes that the right gets correct and the left does not.
The left hemisphere understands the lexicon and grammar of the spoken language but the right hemisphere understands what is said in between the lines. An example of that is.
“It is too cold in here!”
The left hemisphere interprets that as it is too cold and that is that.
But the right hemisphere interprets that as. “I need to turn the heat up” since it reads between the lines.
It is nuanced and also known as the spectrum.
If the left side of the brain is your map of the world and how you see it. The right-hand side of your brain creates the map for you.
Most mental pathologies such as Feminism, Psychopathy, Machiavelian, Sadism, Oppositional Defiant disorder, and Histrionic Disorder are less functioning right hemispheres of the brain according to Dr. Iain McGilchrist. He states that it looks more than plausible that they have a less working right hemisphere. People with a stroke in the right hemisphere blame others for what they just did which is Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
Sounds like most politicians to be honest.
I love how Doctor and Professor Iain McGilchrist describe it as toxic, silly, and foolish behavior.
Swear words come from the Basal ganglia which Tourette’s clearly shows and he describes how you endure cold water better if you swear.
Just like that, it became offensive
Something you never before were offended by suddenly becomes offensive.
Why is that?
Might it be a survival response to the mental model you have of the world or is it the death of your right hemisphere?
I think it is both survival in that you react and also become neurotic and aggressive. But it gets tricky as your right hemisphere is responsible for detecting threats. So if any men are reading this. If you stare at a beautiful woman in a bar or at the supermarket. If you are in front of her. I mean within 180 degrees where her eyes can detect information. She will see if you are looking at her.
She is amazing that way.
It’s her right hemisphere that detects that you are looking at her.
Your right brain hemisphere will be the one questioning your dogmatic binary thinking and rearranging your belief systems. If you can slow down the signals coming from your insula just behind your prefrontal cortex.
That is why sleep and meditation work to slow down the signal from your value system, also known as your insula, to the prefrontal cortex. Thus giving you the option to abstractly and curiously think about possible alternative conclusions.
It is not hard to see how social media works and reshapes the world you live in. Because it feeds on your left hemisphere to get you engaged.
Narcissism, aggression, feminism, sadism, Machiavellians, the world is only black and white or the world is only a spectrum. They are all in the left hemisphere. Cognitive empathy in the left hemisphere and affective(true) empathy in the right hemisphere.
The left hemisphere manipulates you into black-and-white thinking just like a computer does.
It also manipulates others to follow the dogmatic mental model of your world and seeks power. Both are malicious behaviors called Machiavellian, Psychopathy, and Sociopathy.
Today defined as an anti-social personality disorder.
The left hemisphere keeps on repeating and revalidating the same things over and over again. It never questions what you see. Only confirms it because it is your map. The left hemisphere brings its determinism onto every subject regardless if it is different or nuanced.
Humans need to stop being greedy psychopaths because that creates more left-hemisphere people who destroy themselves.
Unfortunately, we might be heading for human collapse since more and more succumb to the left side of brain thinking instead of questioning that and embracing humility and abstraction which is cooperation to overcome the people that have succumbed to left hemisphere thinking.
The connections between the two hemispheres are getting smaller in humans according to Dr. Iain McGilchrist.
Are Women BETTER Communicators Than Men — Or Is It Just Talk?
It depends if the woman uses her right brain hemisphere or not.
I’m grateful for your support!
If you enjoyed this article please leave claps 👏👏👏👏👏, so I know what you enjoy reading the best.
You will find all this above being spoken by Dr. Iain McGilchrist.
More from Dr. Iain McGilchrist: https://channelmcgilchrist.com/home/
