Do you mindmeld?

 

When Star Trek's Mr. Spock wants to transfer information to – or gain information from – another Vulcan, he performs a mindmeld.  (He can mindmeld with other species, including humans, but it’s not always so successful.)  By touching hands or skulls, Spock can download or upload information faultlessly between brains – error-free, and unclouded by emotion.

It's a fantasy of perfect communication.  Who hasn’t dreamed of being able to pump information effortlessly and completely from their head into another’s? 

But mindmelding, even in the fantasy civilisation of the Vulcans, comes with a heavy price.  It can cause mental instability and even death.  Because it violates another’s privacy, the Vulcans saw mindmelding for a time as taboo.  They later developed a moral code according to which a Vulcan would never initiate a mindmeld without the other party’s consent. 

Mindmelding, even for Mr Spock, is deeply problematic.

Mindmelding: communication as transmission

Mindmelding embodies, in an extreme, science-fiction version, our most common view of communication. 

We could call it the transmission model. 

Lacking the phenomenal mental powers of the Vulcans, we humans envisage communication, not so much as mental copying and pasting, as a kind of postal delivery service. 

• We ‘have’ an idea (as if it were a parcel).
• We ‘put the idea into words’ (like putting the parcel into a box).
• We try to ‘put our idea across’ (by ‘conveying’ it, like a parcel through a delivery company).
• And the ‘receiver’ – hopefully – ‘gets’ the idea.

The receiver may need to ‘unpack’ the idea before they can ‘grasp’ it. And, of course, we need to be careful to avoid ‘information overload’. 

That word ‘transmitting’ suggests that we tend to think of communication as a technical process. And the history of the word ‘communication’ supports this idea.

In the nineteenth century, the word ‘communication’ referred mainly to the movement of goods and people. We still use the word like this, of course: roads and railways are forms of communication, just as much as speaking or writing.

 

 

We still use the images of the industrial revolution – the canal, the railway and the postal service – as metaphors for communication.   Information, like freight, comes in ‘bits’; it needs to be stored, transferred and retrieved. And we describe the movement of information in terms of a ‘channel’, along which information ‘flows’.

The classic formulation of the transmission model is the Shannon-Weaver diagram, developed by scientists at the Bell Labs in the 1950s as part of their work to improve telephony.

The transmission model is certainly attractive. It gives the impression that information is objective and quantifiable: something that you and I will always understand in exactly the same way. It makes communication seem measurable, predictable and consistent: sending an email seems to be evidence that I’ve communicated to you.

Above all, the model is simple.  We can draw a diagram to illustrate it.

So what's wrong with the transmission model? 

Well, to begin with, a message differs from a parcel in a very obvious way. When I send the parcel, I no longer have it; when I send a message, I still have it.

But there’s a more serious reason why the model fails to describe communication accurately.

The model is the wrong way round.

Communication begins, not with transmission, but with reception.

No matter how effectively I transmit information, it won’t communicate to you if you don’t receive it.  And in order to receive it, you have to do three things.

• You have to pay attention.
• You have to understand.
• You have to put what you understand in context.

Whatever you notice has the potential to communicate with you.

• If you notice the sign warning of a bend in the road, you can make use of it.
• If you notice the loud siren that suddenly blares through the office, you can respond to it.
• If you notice me gesturing wildly at you across a crowded room, you can make yourself ready to understand the message I’m trying to communicate.

In all three instances, your attention is being deliberately grabbed. The sign is positioned where you can see it at the side of the road; it’s large and brightly coloured.  The siren is loud and sudden, in order to attract your attention to a potential emergency.  I make my gestures big, energetic and unusual so that your attention will be drawn to them.

 

But of course, we often notice things that are not intended to communicate to us.  We notice the rabbit running out in front of the car, or our colleagues leaping out of their chairs as the siren rings, or the people staring oddly at the strange man pretending to be a windmill in the corner of the bar.  All of these things have the potential to communicate if we notice them.

Communication begins when we start paying attention.

As the man said:

We cannot not communicate.

(His name was Paul Watzlawick.)

Towards a new definition of communication

So we need to replace the transmission model of communication with something more accurate.

And the history of the word itself gives us a clue.

‘Communication’ derives from the Latin communis, meaning ‘common’, ‘shared’. It belongs to the family of words that includes communion, communism and community. When we communicate, we are trying to match meanings.

Or, to put it another way:

Communication is creating shared understanding.

We might call it creating rapport.  Or being on the same wavelength.  Or singing from the same songsheet.

Or, I suppose, mind-melding.  Hm.