Chad Francour

Traumatic Brain Injury Recovery, Health & Healing

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Communication!

August 11, 2015 by Chad Leave a Comment

When is a relationship (e.g., platonic or personal) not your your time?  Like previously stated numerous amounts of times I find value in every relationship.  I think a key component to all relationships is communication.  I read in a book that 60% of communication is nonverbal.  

It is well known that good communication is the foundation to any successful relationship, be it personal or professional. It’s important to recognize, though, that it is our nonverbal communication (e.g., facial expressions, gestures, eye contact, posture, and tone of voice) that speak the loudest. The ability to understand and use nonverbal communication, or body language, is a powerful tool that can help you connect, express what you really mean, and build better relationships with others.

When we interact with a person, we continuously give and receive wordless signals. All of our nonverbal behaviors (e.g., the gestures we make, the way we sit, how fast or loud a person would talk, how close we stand, how much eye contact we make) send strong messages. These messages do not stop when you stop speaking to another person. Even when you are silent, a person is still communicating nonverbally.

Nonverbal signals may last for days to weeks to months.  These indirect signals are what I have the hardest to interpret.  Simply put, I do not know if I did something wrong or was it you who needs the time to figure out what you want in your life.  The rumination, then again, starts poking it’s little head into my life again saying, “No one will ever understand so sucks to be you!”

When I think about things normally occur in this fashion.  First is the hope that the person, usually female, will come to self accumulation and realize the actions you or I did put unneeded stress on the relationship and apologize.   Normally, however, this never happens until we reached the breaking point.  The second is solely on what I may or may not have said or done in our meetings together.   I may go through every situation and how could I have done it differently to have a better outcome.  The third is what can I do to change the ladies perception of me.

Furthermore,  I was thinking of buying a recordable Hallmark card and record a funny or clever saying that we shared together.  For example, we use to bite our fingers while we shook hands.  I would ALSO spray some of my Victoria Secret–Very Sexy Cologne– in the card so she remembers what I smell like.  

I have heard the olfactory nerve (e.g., CN1) is strongly associated with memory.  I think this is a true statement because it the first of the 12 nerves in a person’s head.  Another thing that I feel like I add to a relationship.

olfactory nerve

Most often, what comes out of our mouths and what we communicate through our body language are two totally different things. When faced with these mixed signals, the listener has to choose whether to believe your verbal or nonverbal message, and, in most cases, he or she is going to choose the nonverbal because it is a more natural, unconscious language that broadcasts our true feelings and intentions in any given moment.

Social cognition in humans is distinguished by psychological processes that allow us to make inferences about what is going on inside other people’s head (e.g., his or her intentions, feelings, or thoughts) in any given situation. Some of these processes likely account for aspects of human social behavior that are unique like our culture and civilization. Most of the social information (e.g., letting something go) is relatively automatic for most individuals.  Why then, for many TBI survivors, is talking (e.g., verbal and nonverbal) so hard to do for many?  

We typically are a social species meaning that no one component (e.g., friendliness) could not exist without a large-scale collective behavior. In other words, I hold a door open for another person and sooner or later, that person will return the kindness behavior or action.  Much of our social behaviors, even though, are deeply rooted in neurobiologic and psychologic mechanisms that are shared with other animals (e.g., wagging of a dog’s tail)  so why are we as humans any different.  

There are three domains that make us behaved differently in social situations.  The first is the knowledge of a nonsocial environment or the world we share with others. The common-sense view is that knowledge is shared, public, and is subject to judgement. How we may acquire this knowledge of the world  through learning, selection, and categorization is no mystery. The kinds of inferences that we make about the world are certainly complex, it seems that much of this aspect is shared with other animals. Like us, cats and dogs, know about other objects in the world; the properties (e.g., a special toy or ball) or the events  that he or she has acquired knowledge about which objects are good and which are bad, and how some item may direct behavior.

The second and third domains are more mysterious, and it is unclear to what extent, if at all, other animals have access to these cognitions. Having the knowledge of other ways of thinking, and knowledge of our own mind, for example, I feel ecstatic when I learn something new about a person and that same person feels the same way, thus, being able to connect on the same brain wave.

One way of knowing about the social world, of course, is through the same processes by which we know about the nonsocial world; experience.  There is much evidence that some animals can deduce some social cues to better understand social knowledge.  Look at it this way, when a dog is faced with a problem (e.g., ability to open a door to go outside) he or she cannot solve themselves the animal might look back at the owner and whimper, thus, the canine might know that he or she will be helped.

Now considering the second domain the animals ability to show knowledge of one’s own mind is an even more difficult task to show. A mirror is placed in front of an animal in a test to see if self-recognition is able to occur. The animals seems to show some recognition but unable to show knowledge of one’s own mind. Why is this the case?

 

If we look at the thought process of an animal we see that yes an animal has good proprioception but still unable to show his or her cognitive strength.  These abilities share in common with the ability to know other minds is the flexible adoption of a point of view that is different (in space, time, or person) from the way one currently experiences the world. As such, they require the ability to make a distinction between world and mind, between objective and subjective. Although several animals can behave in very flexible ways that support some such ability, it remains unclear whether they truly are able to (a) experience a point of view that they deliberately imagine, (b) distinguish this experience from their own experience in the here and now, and (c) derive from this distinction a concept of “mind” of some sort.

Adult humans show there is no doubt whatsoever that we have knowledge of other minds and our own.   The mechanisms are of great interest because they seem to require something different from, or additional to, the mechanisms that mediate our knowledge of the shared nonsocial environment. In the case of knowledge of other minds, we appear to begin with much the same information as for nonsocial objects—perception of a face, say—but then go on to make inferences that are unique: We infer emotions, intentions, and beliefs of the other person, none of which we can directly observe because they are internal, relational, or dispositional states in some way.

Most puzzling of all is self-knowledge.

Filed Under: Chapters for my book

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