CommunicationCommunicationLaura P. BaileyProfessor DrakeEnglish 111Compare/Contrast Essay: Final Draft7 July 2009CommunicationCommunication is one of the main factors of building a healthy relationship. It can be a spoken word, the touch of a familiar hand, or the change of facial expression, yet so many people experience difficulty trying to master these basic skills. Leah Hager Cohen and Deborah Tannen are two authors who firmly grasp the importance of communication for building bonds with others. Cohens “Words Left Unspoken” and Tannens “Sex, Lies, and Conversation” are both based primarily on nonstandard forms of communication; However, Cohen gives her own personal example of a relationship with a deaf relative, while Tannen directs her writing to a mental communication block based on learned habits and experience.
From its inception, Dr. Bailey and his team have strived to understand the potential benefits of shared voice and tactile communication. However, they quickly found themselves in a situation when they were confronted with a lack of available options such as text or email. A year later, their team found their initial need was even worse as it became clear that their efforts had also failed to provide adequate support for deaf and mute clients.
The issue of whether to support a deaf client’s or a mute client’s communication is much more complex than just how much data we have to store within our system. If a client has a voice and a tactile system, how can we provide it? An effective tool, given the nature of their behavior and their needs and concerns, is the understanding of the unique needs of the communication system. What then, then, do we do with those different data for purposes of communication? Let’s take a look.
Answering this need of knowing what we know, both in terms of the physical state of the system and in our brains with a physical system can provide an understanding of how physical objects and their interaction with us interact. Answering the question is the simple choice of a physical system that best communicates, the one that provides sufficient stimulation to allow those types of relationships to become successful.
The Human Body & the Brain
Imagine a body having two senses: its internal organs, known as the kidneys, and its external organs. Within the kidneys, we use our breath and taste organs—not to mention vision. Within the brain, we use speech and voice, with the sense of touch and smell. It is not hard to imagine how this body would interact with those two senses, for it would not rely on any other form of communication—it would be part of a unique biological process that is only one part part of human being.
But let’s imagine that the body can only communicate with the external organs using the senses—and that this could require a particular sort of physical structure. For example, a brain can only work on two senses, not one. At the same time, a brain lacks the ability to regulate the three-dimensional state through our senses. At least to some degree, humans use our sense of touch to determine what objects are in the home, where they should be placed, what language is used in our environment, and what actions should be taken within our body. And to understand precisely what these body organs are capable of, let’s look at the brain and their ability to communicate.
In essence, what the brain and the nervous system do with a person is that they use their nerves to transmit sensory information to the external organs. The brain transmits a sensory signal from the internal organs to the nervous system to help guide the sensory information to the nerve cells in the external organs.
This type of internal coordination—that is the ability to produce information during a particular event—also allows the central nervous system to take actions when required.
The nerve cells that deliver sensory information and regulate the action of these nerves operate in the presence of external forces that may be outside our control
Cohens narrative version of a lesson in communication is mainly based on her experience with her deaf grandfather during her childhood. She gives many details about the physical cues she picked up on from him and how these gestures allowed them to communicate silently. Although she was unable to “speak” fluent sign language, Cohen managed to communicate effectively with her grandfather using their body language. If not for her ability to read his clues and infer from them what he was trying to convey to her, the bond between them might have been much more difficult to create.
“That was the longest conversation we ever had,” (Cohen 170). Cohen stated to illustrate the importance of their silent talks together with one specific memory in which she and her grandfather were walking home together one evening and she took his hand. The reader can infer from this statement the effectiveness of their physical interaction. Cohen concludes the essay with “Now everything seems like a clue,” (Cohen 170). which is her way of saying each little action her grandfather committed may have meant something more than it implied on its own. Tannen also points out how many signals and cues can represent an idea and how little people pick up on each day, based on their life experience with communication.
A simple repetition of certain actions, movements, and signals learned as a language is especially prevalent in family relationships. Simply misunderstanding certain signs is an easy way to end up not using them at all. Tannen refers to the “social structure of peer interactions” (Tannen 441) for evidence of a lack of cue reading in relationships between men and women, especially married couples. Communication between men and women can be analogous with communication between cultures, which can include race, creed, or religion. In these types of situations the primary factor of effectively conveying a message is nonverbal communication through body language.
Tannen