Why most "miscommunication" isn't miscommunication

Every once in a while a perfectly ordinary conversation becomes strangely confusing. Nobody raises their voice or says anything particularly controversial. Yet somehow two intelligent people reach a point where each is wondering exactly the same thing.

What are you talking about?

Let’s say you’re standing in the kitchen finishing your breakfast croissant and you ask, "Should we stop at the grocery store later?"

Before your husband answers, your mind has already settled on yes. We're almost out of cheese. I loved those fabulous cheesy burritos at that new Mexican restaurant two weeks ago. We should make burritos for dinner. You look over and ask, "Do we have tortillas?"

Your husband heard your first question, "Should we stop at the grocery store later?" His mind settled on yes just as quickly, but the story continued somewhere else. Mike lives right by the grocery store and I've had his hammer sitting in the garage for weeks since I finished that garden bed project. I should finally return it while we're over there.

He answered, "Yeah...because of the hammer."

You stop.

"What are you talking about?"

Now he’s staring at you.

"What are you talking about?"

A few minutes later you're both irritated, and the conversation leaves behind the same explanation millions of ordinary conversations leave behind.

We just can't communicate.

Neither of you was actually misinterpreting something that the other person said. You both received exactly the same starting point and immediately began continuing the story from there. Your story wandered through a cheesy burrito dinner. His went through Mike's house, the borrowed hammer, garden bed, and finally returning it. Neither person was rude or stopped listening. Both minds simply kept asking the same quiet question that minds always ask. What happens next?

The interesting part is that neither of you notices you've already left the original conversation behind. The grocery store quietly disappears beneath the next thought, then the next one and each one after that, until eventually all that remains is tortillas or a hammer. The path that connected those thoughts never feels like a path while you're walking it. It simply feels like part of the same idea. You just start talking again from wherever your own thinking has arrived. 

Every shared moment behaves this way. Give the mind one sentence and it immediately begins exploring different outcomes, following different "what if" paths farther and farther to see what happens next. Some of those paths disappear almost immediately. Others keep unfolding. Before long the conversation is branching in several perfectly reasonable directions at once, although each person experiences only the branch they happen to be following.

The same thing happens in classrooms, although it usually receives a different explanation. A 5th grade science teacher writes Photosynthesis across the board and begins talking about sunlight. Your twins, Brandon and Becca are in that class. Brandon's thinking continues almost exactly where the teacher's thinking continues. The chlorophyll grabs the sunlight, turns it into sugar, and that's basically the plant eating. Each new idea quietly attaches itself to the one before it, and thirty minutes later Brandon has built almost the same invisible structure the teacher has been building all along.

Becca looks at the very same word, Photosynthesis, on the board and continues somewhere else. Why do mushrooms survive without any sunlight at all? What about plants that aren't even green? Maybe this is why I need to keep my aquarium light on, besides letting the fish know it’s daytime of course. Her mind is still on the lesson, it's just headed somewhere the teacher didn't plan for.

By the end of science, Brandon has followed one branch much deeper. Becca has explored several neighboring branches that were just as interesting, and just as photosynthesis related, but not exactly what the teacher was going to test on next week. Brandon leaves feeling as though science makes sense. Becca complains to you that science always seems to skip so many steps. You nod, “I know how that feels.”

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