From the mind and into words

Ever stopped to think what process you go through as you verbalise information and produce these things called 'words' that enable you to get by in the world?

It's quite simple.

Remember a journey you took to see someone recently and just take a moment to verbalise your journey.

How many words did you use? Did you recover ALL the information apparent in that experience? I don't think so!

Ponder

Just ponder on this for a moment. What was the temperature on that day? How much money did you have in your pocket? What were wearing? Did you mention any of these things?

The reason for this is that as you recall information from your memory in relation to that experience there are a few 'filters' in place that delete, distort and generalise that information and as you verbalise it, the filters 'kick in'. Therefore, the information is there, but unless there is an instruction to recover that specific point, it will be 'deleted' as it is processed into language.

Different experiences of words = different linguistic response

You might have commeneted on the weather occuring on your journey and you may have described it as 'nice/pleasant'. But what does 'pleasant' mean to you. If you were to ask 10 people what pleasant meant, you'd get a number of different responses that in a round about way would quantify or equate to pleasant but not every answer would be exactly the same. This is because 'distortions' occur in language - same words, different expriences associated with that word.

Back to the example again. You may have gone as far to comment (probably not though!) on a landmark and have said that you 'always' pass or that 'everyone' looked stressed or 'all' the lights were red on the way. These 'generalisations' - always, everyone, all - are not linguistically true. Let's look at 'everyone looked stressed'. Did every person you saw look stressed? Serioulsly, even the little boy with the ice cream or the cat or dog you saw? Probably not.

Ask more questions

So language is created through a process of deleting, distorting and generalising information that you contain in your mind relational to that experience. Just think about all the questions you can now ask about a persons journey and what information you might find that if you didn't ask, you'd never know.....