Our minds are stimulated by change. And according to William Storr, author of The Science of Storytelling, change is the essence of a story.
Change comes from two places. Within the body, and outside of the body. Our brains detect signals from both of these locations, and project models of what’s going on to our minds.
My son, in his early days as a baby, would cry whenever his mind detected a change. Whilst we tend to think of crying as something pathetic, for babies it is something empowering. It creates an instinctive response in adults nearby to run over and care for them.
But crying is also inefficient. One of the challenges parents face when looking after crying babies is figuring out what’s wrong. A baby can’t tell you if it’s hungry, or thirsty, or needs a nappy change, or just got stung by a bee. All a baby can do is cry and let you figure it out.
As a baby’s brain develops, it starts to communicate more specifically. This happens for numerous reasons, but one is probably because communication allows the baby to get you to take care of its specific needs a lot faster.
At first, they start mimicking simple sounds. I have a video of me making raspberry noises at my 3 month old son when we were relaxing on holiday in Thailand. He then responded by blowing a rasberry back at me, which was the first time he mimicked a sound.
Mimicking sounds, again, happens for numerous reasons, but one is probably because it helps build a bond between the baby and the bigger people around them who can provide for them. My reaction to my son’s raspberry noises was to burst out laughing, fold over and kiss him on the head, to which he responded by laughing as well.
Eventually though, the mimicking becomes a bit more sophisticated and they start to mimic words that they can use to describe their needs more specifically. My two year old son, instead of crying, can say “Milk” or “hungry” or “Walk”. The result is the faster satisfaction of their needs when their internal state or external world changes.
Jeremy Lent, author of The Patterning Instinct, proposes an underlying theory that explains how and why children learn language, and also how human beings create cultures and civilisations. His theory is that our brains have an instinct for seeking out patterns.
According to this theory, young children learn language by first recognising patterns in the sounds, or more specifically phonemes, coming from the adults around them. They pay more attention to phonemes from languages their family speak than from other languages, because their brains are more familiar with the patterns of their family’s language.
My son seems to prove this theory. To him, words are groups of phonemes that can be used to label things. For example, he knows how to say the word “small”, but instead of pronouncing it as one sound, he’ll emphasise each individual phoneme: “Si..maw…le”. It’s extremely cute to listen to!
Now that he’s two years old, he’s amassed a vocualary of probably several hundred labels, in both English and Chinese (his mother’s language). And there are interesting lessons to be learnt about clear communication from the way he’s amassed his vocabulary.
The first words he learnt were used to label the things in the world around him. “Duck”, “Dog”, “Slide”, “Swing”, “Bubbles”, “Milk”, “Mummy”, “Daddy”, “Belly”, “Nose” etc.
His use of these words was not always accurate though, at least according to our definitions. For example, any feathered creature with wings was a “Duck”, whereas to me there are hundreds of different types of feathered creatures with wings, all of which fall under the category of “Bird”. But for some reason, he still prefers to use “Duck”!
Now, his vocabulary is extending into other areas. It’s only in recent months that he’s started using a lot more words to describe his feelings; “Sleepy”, “Hungry”, “Full”, “Hurt”.
He’s also started stringing together sentences. Albeit, sentences that we’ve taught him, but sentences that represent what he wants. “Read a book”, “Drink milk”, “Hug mummy”.
So what is the lesson from all of this? It’s that the foundational language processing layers of our brains use labels to describe our sensory experiences and needs. As my son continues to expand his language abilities, everything will be built on this foundational layer.
Which means for you to make meaning, talk to the senses. Describe images for the eyes, sounds for the ears, smells for the nose, tastes for the mouth and touch for the skin. Describe internal feelings, and wants and needs.
Your brain is really just a wrinkly, grey blob sitting in a dark, silent skull. Sparks of light (neurons) travel from the senses to the brain like highways viewed from space at night. The brain then acts like a magical cinema for the mind.
One spark of light from the eyes is similar to the spark of light that represents a bird. Another spark of light from the ears is confirms this bird is probably a parrot. More sparks of light let us know the rough location and the colours of this parrot and that its head is moving. Another spark of light shoots like a painful bolt of lighting from the finger to the brain reminding us that the parrots’ bite hurts and our brain projects the feeling of caution.
Our minds are really just us sitting in a magical cinema. The cinema takes those magical sparks of light and projects for us a rough image of what the world around us is probably like.
A good communicator sits in the projection room. They adjust the lighting, the audio, and carefully project a reel of film for other people to experience.
But they also choose the best reel to project.
There are a lot of things you can talk about, but to project a magical experience you need to talk about a change that matters. Remember, the mind is a change detective. What is the change that matters?
Your magical cinema references all of this incoming data from reality against a massive database of sensory memories. It then uses both sets of data to project a rough prediction of what the world is really like. So actually, we’re not even seeing a hallucination of reality, we’re just seeing a hallucination of what our brain predicts is reality.
For example, if you walk into your bedroom, and suddenly the bed is not there, you’ll do a double take. According to your brain’s prediction, there should be a bed in your room. But according to the incoming data, there is no bed in your room. Suddenly, our models of prediction have been proven wrong.
This leaves us feeling unsettled and starts an instinctive reaction want to know more. Why is there no bed in my room? How can I make sense of this?
A baby, in its attempts to cry, is an attempt to conquer change. Its belly goes from settled to hungry. This is an undesirable change, and all of its instincts are telling it to take care of that change immediately.
Just yesterday, my son became the centre of attention. We took my son to eat at a restaurant and after eating, I took him to wash his hands. Unfortunately, there was water everywhere, and I didn’t realise at the time but I managed to get his shirt very wet. As we walked back to the table, my son started pulling at his shirt and said loudly to me in Chinese “不要!” which means “Don’t want!”.
We had to take my son’s shirt off, which meant he walked home topless. On the way back, numerous people turned their heads to acknowledge the only topless little boy walking down that pavement. This was a change from the norm. Incoming visual data signalled to their brains that there was something not normal here. Their faces then turned to pay attention to what this change was. Some made comments to each other asking why this little boy would be walking with no top on. Others tried to justify to each other that he’s probably too hot.
Our brains need to make sense of our environment. When something doesn’t make sense, it’s dangerous. The birds might have stopped signing because they all flew away when they saw a lion enter the territory. My tribe may have all gone silent and still because one of the elders just passed away. The animals may have all run for the hills because they just detected an oncoming tsunami.
Remember, the mind is a change detective. And if you want to be a good communicator, not only do you need to project a sensory experience into their minds, you need to project a sensory experience of change.
Always consider, what is the change I want to communicate, and how can I describe this in terms of sensory experiences, feelings and needs.
