Improve Your Communication Skills, 2nd Edition

• ‘I was feeling unhappy but now feel less unhappy’;
• ‘I am not injured; there’s no need to help me’;
• ‘Actually, I feel lousy but I don’t want you to know it’;
• ‘Help!’
– or any one of a dozen other ideas. The receiver has to 
understand the meaning of the words if they are to respond 
appropriately; but the words may not contain the speaker’s whole 
meaning.
If we want to develop our communication skills, we need to 
move beyond the transmission model. We need to think about 
communication in a new way. And that means thinking about 
how we understand.
There is a paradox in communicating. I cannot expect 
that you will understand 
everything
 I tell you; and I 
cannot expect that you will understand 
only
 what I tell 
you.
(with thanks to Patrick Bouvard)
( c) 2011 Kogan Page L imited, All Rights Reserved.

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7 What is Communication?
Understanding how we understand
Understanding is essentially a pattern-matching process. We 
create meaning by matching external stimuli from our 
environment to mental patterns inside our brains.
The human brain is the most complex system we know of. It 
contains 100 billion neurons (think of a neuron as a kind of 
switch). The power of the brain lies in its networking capacity. 
The brain groups neurons into networks that ‘switch on’ during 
certain mental activities. These networks are infinitely flexible: 
we can alter existing networks, and grow new ones. The number 
of possible neural networks in one brain easily exceeds the 
number of particles in the known universe.
The brain is a mighty networker; but it is also an amazing 
processor. My computer is a serial processor: it can only do one 
thing at a time. We can describe the brain as a parallel processor. 
It can work on many things at once. If one neural circuit finishes 
before another, it sends the information to other networks so 
that they can start to use it.
Parallel processing allows the brain to develop a very 
dynamic relationship with reality. Think of it as ‘bottom-up’ 
processing and ‘top-down’ processing.