Why our brains make it sometimes so hard to make others see what we see … 

Read more thoughts on the art of communicating week-daily at https://michaelgerharz.com/blog

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Speaking is a sequential process.

We can only speak one word after another.

However, thoughts aren’t sequential.

When I think something, let's say the word “orange”, a network of associations

immediately pops up in my brain.

In yours, too.

But most likely yours is different than mine.

Thoughts form a network.

One thought leads to other thoughts, which lead to yet more

thoughts, loosely connected and jumping from one to the other.

One of the major challenges for speakers is that our audiences’ networks of

associations are different from ours.

we can't just tell somebody our network of

associations, because there's no easy way of serializing that network.

Speaking is sequential.

It requires a series of thoughts.

If we want to tell somebody something, it can only be done one word after another.

My knowledge network has to be transformed into a linear stream of information.

The problem is that every thought, every word even, in this stream

of information, sparks a network of associations for our audience.

And again for the next thought.

Our hope is that it will fit into our audience's knowledge net in a meaningful

way, ideally ending up with the same network than we have in our heads.

But that's far from guaranteed.

And there's no easy way to find out.

But a good start is to acknowledge this dilemma and take into

account that our audiences might have a completely different set

of associations than we have.