Category Archives: Problem Practices

Communication behavior or analysis that is often counter-productive

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Tics

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Tics are sometimes functional. And others? Just annoying.

Humans come in many forms, with custom wrapping that could only be theirs.  The more we get to know a person the more we can identify the signature features of how they address others.  Most of these verbal or visual habits may hardly raise an eyebrow.  But other habits may come to be seen as bumps on the road to fluency: verbal peculiarities that are noticed and, perhaps, an unintended source of amusement.

Communication “tics” are not alway manifest in utterances.  But many are, taking the form of over-used locutions, repeated words or phrases, or unusual ways of verbally ‘punctuating’ words.  For example, many of us fall prey to the silence-filling “auh” when a full stop might be better.  Others of us lean on “you know” or “um” as silence-fillers.  They frequently serve to keep a verbalization sequence alive, as if it was territory to be held against potential invaders.  “Auh” is like a gate that never opens to let another pass.  And “you know” can get especially annoying when it seems to have fully replaced the written equivalent of a simple period.

Alternatively, we may keep a collection of voices available for babies, pets or friends,  unaware that its endless use can be grating. A high-pitched ‘baby’ voice directed to an old dog can may endearing the first few times, but can become a stale as a Frankie Valli hit that is heard a bit too often.

Those of us with allergies or sinus issues know we must  sometimes drive others crazy with coughs, throat-clearing, nose-blowing or worse. Few are as bad or as funny as the Odd Couple’s Felix. The infamous diner scene from Neil Simon’s film isn’t the first time that Jack Lemmon’s Felix was to test Oscar’s patience.

Some  tics are functional.  I had a professor who, when he grew excited about making a point, would begin to trip over his words.  He would pause and then repeat their first syllables, and it was positively riveting: a kind of oral punctuation that worked.

More annoying can be the habits of raising one’s voice at the end of a statement or, conversely, lowering vocal volume to inaudibility. Both patterns can persist regardless of what is being said.  A routine rise in pitch at the end of a thought can leave it sounding like a would-be question, sometimes signaling a tentativeness and turning ideas into “maybe” assertions. The different problem of dropping one’s vocal volume at the end of a thought leaves us unsure of what we heard.  The thought seems to vanish into a fog of receding sound. Film directors sometime miss the pattern when they are working with actors who have never worked in live theater, where there learn to ‘project’ to the back of the house.  The result can leave viewers wondering what was said in the last few words of a line. To be sure, the British sometimes prefer self-effacing mumbles, leaving Americans to check with each other about what the Earl of Whatever was suggesting in the last scene.  That is still preferred to what Brits sometimes hear as rude shouts from their American cousins.

Tics are mostly harmless. Though when they begin to seem like a pattern that is its own sideshow, they can swamp the ideas or feelings that are supposed at the center of an exchange.

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The Mistake of Multitasking

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There’s near unanimity in the literature on comprehension that critical thinking and accurate listening decline when we fragment our attention.

Fall’s quicker pace in the school and workplace offers the chance for a timely remember that some work habits are self-defeating.  In terms of attention to detail, perhaps nothing exacts a higher price than the belief that we can do several things at once.

As I’ve noted in this space before, the fundamental problem is that no one is good at multitasking.  We are simply not wired to fully deal with a variety of stimuli at once.  We may think otherwise. But how often do you hear someone else offering reminders that suggest our attention was elsewhere? “I told you that yesterday,” “You must have missed it,” or “You left some important things in that email” all serve as useful indicators.

In computer terms, we are better at serial processing than parallel processing. Technology writer Nicholas Carr explains why our brains cannot successfully process more than a few competing bits of information:

There’s near unanimity in the literature on comprehension that critical thinking and listening declines when we fragment our attention. To put it simply, multitasking makes us just a little bit stupid. As researcher Clifford Nass famously noted, multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy.”  Because “everything distracts them,” their intellectual performance on important tasks deteriorates.  Sometimes the person addicted to a digital stew of stimuli is the last to know that they have become functionally impaired.

It’s a common mistake to assume that being “busy” means being “fully engaged.”  We perform our busyness as a badge of honor.  But it’s closer to the truth to conclude that the more we structure lives to include distractions, the less we are able to get past this self-induced noise that complicates the completion of an important task.

Try a simple experiment.  Read your email or a series of text-messages while also listening to someone explain how to get to an address on the other side of town. No GPS device allowed. An active and full-time listener will probably process the directions correctly, or ask questions until they have the mental map they need.  The split-time listener is more likely to end up lost, often compounding their distraction by calling from from a moving car to get new directions.  Alas, that makes things even worse. Distracted driving is a form of multitasking that kills more pedestrians each year.

Look for models in those from all walks of life who still have the will to engage with one thing for an extended period.  These linear thinkers may be younger readers happily caught in the thrall of a writer or literary genre; newspaper consumers who will follow an investigative story across three pages of a broadsheet; or the curious who are in the thrall of a speaker or performer over a sustained period of time. To be sure, these individuals increasingly seem to be outliers. We now tend to notice an “unusual” passion for thirsty listening, ‘doing’ or reading.  These linear thinkers are now much more out of the norm, different from the rest of us swamped in a clutter of trivia.