A discussion with Charles Entrekin about nonverbal communication, consciousness, and the sense of self. 

“Multicultural differences in body language, facial expression, use of space, and especially gestures, are enormous and enormously open to misinterpretation.” Susan M. Heathfield

As someone who became visually challenged later in life, what is your experience with how that changed communication for you? Studies imply that a large part of communication is based on visual cues. Do you find any anecdotal truth in that? How?

I think that a great deal of information for conversation comes from facial expression and body language. I have noticed that when I can’t see people’s expressions, I can’t read their intent. When people talk with their hands, they are delivering to you information about their message, when they are smiling with their eyes, they are providing information for understanding. Body language is obscured, isolated out of the conversation, when you can’t see it. Without that, you are left with tone of voice and the distraction of other sounds in the room that also take up your attention. Dr. Albert Mehrabian (Silent Messages: Implicit Communication of Emotions and Attitudes), conducted several studies in the 1960s on nonverbal communication. His resultant data has been contested for decades—7% of any message is conveyed through words, 38% through certain vocal elements, and 55% through nonverbal elements (facial expressions, gestures, posture, etc.)—but the upshot of his and subsequent research is that the majority of communication is non-verbal.

This strikes me, also, as one of the more interesting problems with email and texting, that you don’t have any of this visual information and so it becomes considerably more important that context be provided. Yet email and text are designed for quick communication and don’t lend themselves to the development of context and dependent language to explain what the message is.

In addition, the mind fills in data that is not readily available via perception. We think we know and recognize our world and we base our reactions on pre-conceived knowledge. The Invisible Gorilla observational experiment is an example that, as a species, we miss a lot. Our perceptions change communication and discourse in vital ways.

I was struck by this selective attention experiment in which students were given the task of doing mathematical computations aloud while tossing a beanbag (so they had to be totally concentrated on what they were doing). During the exercise, a man dressed in a gorilla suit walked through their midst. When they were shown the footage later, they were flabbergasted because most of the participants didn’t see the gorilla. Did you? It shows you that, when people are distracted, their observational ability suffers.

Confusion as a result of misinterpretation can lead to hurt feelings, missed appointments and misunderstandings, but there are more serious implications about what we see, what we don’t see, and what we know and don’t know much of the time.

This brings me to the notion that psychology traditionally recognizes that each unique individual is, in fact, a combination of selves: a Perceptual Self, a Narrative Self, and a Social Self.

In a recent Sam Harris podcast Anil Seth believes it is important to elucidate the Perceptual Self by subcategory: the Bodily Self, the Perspectival Self, and the Volitional Self.  Seth postulates that the primary job of the brain is to regulate homeostasis in the body. The sensory receptors of the “Bodily Self” receive stimuli from both internal interoception and external experiential inference. Predictive perception regulates the internal state, as well as introceptive inference (the experience of having a body).

The Perspectival Self is the experience of perceiving the world from a first-person point of view.

The Volitional Self is the cognitive process of intention, of agency, of urges. It is one of the primary psychological functions that inspires the individual to be the cause of a particular course of action.

The second and third aspects of selfhood affect me most, in my opinion. The Narrative Self (also referred to as the Autobiographical Self or the Historical Self) is built from a rich set of autobiographical memories over a course of time. This is the part of self-recognition where the “I” comes in—the ego of an organism. As I lose my eyesight—or when I was diagnosed with cancer or Parkinson’s—my fundamental perception of “myself” had to adjust, adapt, evolve. The Narrative Self therefore animates my Social Self.

The Social Self is refracted through the perceptions of others, through a unique social milieu.

“Now, think about this for a minute,” says Anil Seth in his TedTalk. “If hallucination is a kind of uncontrolled perception, then perception right here and right now is also a kind of hallucination, but a controlled hallucination in which the brain’s predictions are being reined in by sensory information from the world. In fact, we’re all hallucinating all the time, including right now. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, we call that reality.”

Objective reality is also influenced by tribal affiliation. Human beings tend to rely less on intuition and rely on perceptions of others to confirm what we see and hear and feel. Viewing the Social Self—through the perceptions of others—is the locus of creating confirmation bias. 

The distinction between the Social Self and the Narrative Self is important here. My social interactions are diminished by my lack of vision because of loss of perceptual and experiential information. I am thrown back to a reliance on the Historical or Narrative Self, which is also under duress because I no longer have a Social Self with confidence, which affects my Narrative Self, the story I tell myself about who I am. I begin to doubt who I am, who I am becoming. My Narrative Self begins to be defined by an unreliable experience and perception.

As an example of this phenomena, Anil Seth demonstrates the rubber hand illusion.

“A person’s real hand is hidden from view, and that fake rubber hand is placed in front of them. Then both hands are simultaneously stroked with a paintbrush while the person stares at the fake hand. Now, for most people, after a while, this leads to the very uncanny sensation that the fake hand is in fact part of their body. And the idea is that the congruence between seeing touch and feeling touch on an object that looks like a hand and is roughly where a hand should be, is enough evidence for the brain to make its best guess that the fake hand is in fact part of the body.

So you can measure all kinds of clever things. You can measure skin conductance and startle responses, but there’s no need. It’s clear [the guy in blue] has assimilated the fake hand. This means that even experiences of what our body is is a kind of best guessing –a kind of controlled hallucination by the brain. Just as if it was his own arm, the brain is supplying the information to say what is real and what is not real.”

I have a personal anecdote to further represent this issue. I suffer from Charles Bonnet Syndrome, which means that I experience visual hallucinations that are based on my eyes not providing me with enough information. I have a blog post about the phenomenon here. I don’t see clearly what is actually there, so the brain supplies an alternative view.

“Consider that each human eye normally receives data at a rate of about 8.75 megabits per second,” says Allen Bellows, “a bandwidth which is significantly greater than most high-speed Internet connections. The visual cortex is the most massive system in the human brain, and it is packed with pathways which manipulate the rush of visual data before handing it over to the conscious mind. When disease begins to kink this firehose of information, a legion of neurons is left standing idle.”

 For example, when we were driving to an appointment in San Francisco and were surrounded by trees, what I saw were tall apartment buildings from the Lower East Side in NYC. Or when we were crossing the Bay Bridge, I saw meadows and landscapes stretching off into the distance. What was happening here? My brain did not have enough visual stimuli from my Perceptual Self, so it created a new image.

For me, I have learned to make friends with what I see, so that I am not upset with it. It is sometimes funny or amusing. What I am seeing is my brain providing the information to make sense of what I am seeing. My consciousness of the world outside is limited by visual perception, what I can see or what I can’t see. Consequently, I also make up some of the lack of visual perception with auditory or tactile substitution.

How does this relate to communication? My Social Self is altered and my Narrative Self is unsure. When I enter into conversation with friends and family, I often hear their words but have to guess at what they are meaning because I cannot read their gestures—their upturned smile or downturned frown—and I have to go with sound alone and a blurred image of a face that I know really well to guess what is going on. I engage in a lot of guesswork.

Consequently, my Social Self has become quieter and more humble in its interpretation of what is going on around me. In many ways, this has made me be a friendlier, warmer, more open person, more willing to admit mistakes, more willing to forgive, and more willing to be open to new experiences.

In an increasingly digital world, how does verbal acuity define identity in society? How much of the persona, defined in the virtual world, informs our perceptual selves?

A persona is a mask, a version of how we want the world to see us.  We don and remove our mask at will. The more time we spend wearing the mask, the more it becomes a defining part of the self.  However, the digital identity is more removed and more dangerous because it is anonymous. The avatar is not animated by the rich memories over the course of time. Thus, the resultant information—the Narrative and Social Perspective—becomes warped in the vacuum of impersonal relations and has the potential to have weak connections to or be devoid of the empathetic and moral compass to inform social choices and decision-making, no matter how articulate the digital source.

There are very few occasions where one is held accountable for an online digital identity. Without the experience of interpersonal relationships, it becomes too easy to offer empirical evidence (Fake News!) not backed up by factual information. As Thomas Metzinger elucidates in his essay “Intellectual Honesty”:

“The collective self-image of the species Homo Sapiens will increasingly be one of a being caught in evolved mechanisms of self-deception to the point of becoming a victim of its own actions. It will be an image of a class of naturally evolved cognitive systems that, because of their own cognitive structure, are unable to react adequately to certain challenges—even when they are able to intellectually grasp the expected consequences, and even when, in addition, they consciously experience this very fact about themselves clearly and distinctly […] Intellectual honesty means simply not being willing to lie to oneself. It is closely related to old-fashioned values such as propriety, integrity and sincerity, to a certain form of ‘inner decency.’ Perhaps one could say that it is a very conservative way of being truly subversive.”

Our ethical conflicts are created by the unknown variables between interpersonal communication, confirmation bias, defined personal narrative, and social mores.  As my grandmother used to say, “Be careful who you hang out with because they define who you are and who you become.” I want the people I associate with to practice honest interaction, with themselves and the outside world. I aspire to that but, even like a virtuoso violinist, the experience of living in the world necessitates that you have to practice all the time.

Personally, I have received some relief through the practice of mindful communication. Mindfulness makes a huge difference in relocating oneself and the world. From a mindfulness perspective, your historical story is a fabrication, is made up, is unreliable as a guide to future ways of being in the world.  You understand compassion because you are able to let go of attachments to your story, your Narrative Self, and realize your filters are flawed. You must come to grips with the reality you are living in, rather than the reality you want it to be. This was a profound revelation for me, that my “story” is a construct of my brain and subject to modification as information becomes available. By contrast, digital identities are static.

Part of the concept of “letting go of the self” is inspired by my philosophical study of Buddhism. The Buddhist understanding of “no-self” is a comforting concept for me in the light of the other perceived selves that are no longer undamaged by my lack of eyesight.

In light of digital advancement, how could your unique experiences inform understanding of effective communication? How can young people benefit from your experiences to sustain reliable discourse and be effective in management and teams? How do think communication can evolve in a positive way in the global marketplace?

I think that my situation has made me more aware of sensory stimulus and more observational in general. How warm is the room? How cool? Is there air-conditioning? Breeze? Is there background noise or other external stimuli? I have become more proficient in evaluating the ambient atmosphere as a barometer of conversation, like other stimuli I used to discount or ignore.  When the ambient atmosphere increases, context of information is lessened.

“Imagine being a brain. You’re locked inside a bony skull, trying to figure what’s out there in the world. There’s no lights inside the skull. There’s no sound either. All you’ve got to go on is streams of electrical impulses which are only indirectly related to things in the world, whatever they may be. So perception — figuring out what’s there — has to be a process of informed guesswork in which the brain combines these sensory signals with its prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is to form its best guess of what caused those signals. The brain doesn’t hear sound or see light. What we perceive is its best guess of what’s out there in the world.” Anil Seth.

To illustrate the point, Dr. Seth creates a sound experiment in which the neurologist plays a recording of a distorted, unintelligible, alien sound. When Seth plays a recording of his own voice, suddenly the voice on the original recording is clear because the brain accepts Seth’s translation. In the same manner, if I come across an object that I don’t see clearly, I will reach out to touch it. When I touch the object, my brain supplies the information necessary to “recognize” it—a book, my phone, or an I-pad.

Recognizing (from studying Charles Bonnet Syndrome) that my brain is augmenting the visual stimuli with tactile information to “see” an object, I have learned to practice avoiding confirmation bias (the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories) and base new ideas or projects on empirical data and independent sources of information.

Future technology should and will likely focus on facilitating a communication atmosphere. As we become more global-centric, visual communication technology will be increasingly important because physical cues are a barometer of interpersonal communication. Even on today’s news, audiences listen to the dialogue but also react to visual stimuli—a panelist rolling their eyes or desperately trying to signal an interruption to contest a point. Holograms and other communication technology currently in its infancy will be vital. Face to face communication across global pathways with access to virtual drawers of shared information is the technological path forward.

It is important to back up a bit and think about where we are. If you think about what we have done as a species, when you know how we interpret what is outside of our “bony domes,” it is amazing. It is amazing that we have created mathematics to study the world, astronomy to see it, art to emulate the experience. As a species, we have reached out and touched the world in remarkable ways, figured out how to manipulate and use it, for better or worse. But, in the meantime, we have left behind something important. We have been inventing this world we live in: invented languages to describe it, invented telescopes to see it, invented vehicles to circumnavigate it, invented religions to give us comfort, and invented politics and governments to give us a sense of control, and yes, invented weapons of mass destruction. We forgot to understand what it means that we made it all up. Meaning is human-made. It is not built into reality, but a part of our human world. We engage in atrocities and war because we forget that all understanding is human invention. And these inventions can lead us into a true hallucination that has dangerous and disastrous implications. Or maybe we can wake up and realize who we are, who we have been, and where we are going. The beauty that remains to us lies in our art, our music, and our ability to create as part of the ecosystem on this magical planet we call Earth.

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” Albert Einstein