From colour blindness to hallucinations and psychedelics, perception is a fluid and bewildering phenomenon and the big question for us creatives always is: how much of our vision will actually be grasped by the public.

The way communication happens is actually amazing because of the weird and maybe illogical nature of how information “travels”. While we may imagine invisible vibrations traveling through space from one’s mouth to another one’s ears and carrying bits of thought, the interesting fact is that it actually doesn’t work that way and that thoughts can’t really travel. At least not in the way we’d expect them to.

Still the bedrock of how communication works is the 80 year old Shannon–Weaver model of communication, dubbed by many social scientists as the “mother of all models”. Its schematics consists of a sender and their message, a means of communication (transmission, channel and reception) some noise that can occur and the receiver. 

But, while being a thorough and quite detailed study of how informational systems work, it is fantastic how one small part of one of its sentences was overlooked by so many readers: 

»The concept of information developed in this theory at first seems disappointing and bizarre — disappointing because it has nothing to do with meaning …«

Nothing to do with meaning, huh? Well, information on the other hand has absolutely everything to do with meaning — without it there would really be no point in trying to communicate with anyone! 

But the issue isn’t with the text; Shannon and Weaver went to great efforts to describe every detail of how communication travels between systems, and the problem of their explanation wasn’t misinformed or wrong. Nobody seemed to notice that it was published in The Bell System technical journal and was intended for studying the ways of communication between machines, not humans. 

For some weird reason, most social scientists thought that there would be any difference between a telephone and a human being.

Now the main difference is that humans, unlike telephones, fax machines and digital modems, don’t just receive and decode impulses — we interpret them subjectively. And, while machines must speak the same language to be able to communicate with each other, one could say that humans never really speak the same language, yet we are able to communicate nonetheless.

So, why is that? And why is everybody who thinks our brains are like computers probably off in their thinking?

This will be a series on perception and communication and will be continued in the next blog. I hope you enjoy the topic, I myself am fascinated by perception and the mind.