Communication hurdles

Prof. Alfred Hankell

a_hankell@yahoo.com 1

Classes/Coaching on Demand

Communication - Social Media - Corporate Culture - Team Building - Diversity

Problem Solving – Leadership – Innovation – Creativity - Critical Reasoning

Synthesizing – IQ / EQ / CQ - Job Interview – Presentations – Negotiations - TOEFL


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•Who are you?

•What defines you?

•Some lines drawn on your fingertips?

•Some switches in your DNA?

•Not really.


You are 100,000,000,000 Neurons +
Trillions & Trillions of Connections

No 2 neurons are the same worldwide.


You are that energy making those
connections by using chemicals.

That defines YOU.

But it also defines the reality that only
YOU “see”.


Reality is in the World Without

But you “see” the World Within

What you “see” is filtered by your
neurological connections


Those connections are your World
Within

Your interpretation of reality

And that is the main hurdle for
communication.


Check the studies by Lera Boroditsky
from the Stanford University among
others


iStockphoto.com

Yes, this is a bridge.
Look at it for a moment and ask yourself, "What three descriptive words come
into my head when I look at a bridge?" This bridge, or any bridge. (You only get
three.)

OK, here's the same bridge. Does it by any chance look:

iStockphoto.com


Or, are you more likely to describe it as:

iStockphoto.com


The first batch of words — such as
beautiful, elegant, slender — were those
used most often by a group of German
speakers participating in an experiment by
Lera Boroditsky, an assistant psychology
professor at Stanford University.


She told the group to describe the image
that came to mind when they were shown
the word, "bridge.“

The second batch of words — such as
strong, sturdy, towering — were most often
chosen by people whose first language is
Spanish.


What explains the difference?

Boroditsky proposes that because the word
for "bridge" in German — die brucke — is a
feminine noun, and the word for "bridge" in
Spanish — el puente — is a masculine
noun, native speakers unconsciously give
nouns the characteristics of their
grammatical gender.


"Does treating chairs as masculine and
beds as feminine in the grammar make
Russian speakers think of chairs as being
more like men and beds as more like
women in some way?" she asks in a recent
essay.


"It turns out that it does. In one study, we
asked German and Spanish speakers to
describe objects having opposite gender
assignment in those two languages. The
descriptions they gave differed in a way
predicted by grammatical gender."

When asked to describe a "key" — a word
that is masculine in German and feminine
in Spanish — German speakers were more
likely to use words such as "hard," "heavy,"
"jagged," "metal," "serrated" and "useful."


Spanish speakers were more likely to say
"golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny"
and "tiny."


Boroditsky created a pretend language
based on her research — called "Gumbuzi"
— replete with its own list of male and
female nouns. Students drilled in the
language were then shown bridges and
tables and chairs to see if they began to
characterize these things with their newly
minted genders.


OK. Ready for the answer? They did.


Boroditsky suggests that the grammar we
learn from our parents, whether we realize
it or not, affects our sensual experience of
the world.

Spaniards and Germans can see the same
things, wear the same cloths, eat the same
foods and use the same machines. But
deep down, they are having very different
feelings about the world about them.


William Shakespeare
may have said (through
Juliet's lips): "a rose by
any other name would
smell as sweet," but
Boroditsky thinks
Shakespeare was
wrong. Words, and
classifications of words
in different languages,
Kean Collection/Getty Images
do matter, she thinks.


(In case you don't speak Gumbuzi, "oos
huff" means "a rose.“)


Boroditsky does an experiment — two
bags, both filled with rose petals, but with
different labels — that proves the Bard
wrong. Or so she says.


Boroditsky's essay on this subject, "How
Does Our Language Shape the Way We
Think?" is part of the anthology What's
Next?" (Vintage Books, June 2009).

Check Video on My Telly: http://telly.com/3QZPV5


Thank you for watching…
Have a Nice Day and God Bless You!



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