Yeah, but, what are you saying?

There are many, many brilliant scientists doing many, many brilliant things in the field of Parkinson’s that I can’t comprehend. That’s good…and bad.

The good is in that none of us can do this work, effectively, on our own. No one person is going to drive us toward discovery on his or her own. We must work together, which means different people handle different parts of the work. Simple enough…in concept.

The bad comes from how this work gets shared. There’s a communication and a sharing problem. Some of it is competitive and financial - as laid out in this article. There’s another issue called the “file drawer effect”. In short, this means the author, or publisher, only shows the parts of the study that support what he or she want to present. “Observation bias”, or seeing what we want to see, is another term that gets thrown in here.

But what if the data is solid and the recipients are hungry to hear it, they even speak the same language, and the information still isn’t getting across? There’s no way to miss then, right? Well…

It turns out that communication, even with all our technology and information, or perhaps because of it, in some cases, is still a challenge. The simplest transfer of information is not, in fact, always simple. One person saying something does not mean it is received by the listener.

In improvisation, we work on these specific listening skills to heighten the probability of a dynamic exchange of information between people and even groups. Believe it or not, we do it with games. Many of them are simple - so simple as to be dismissed if they’re not understood and practiced effectively.

Take the mirroring exercise. It’s about as simple as it gets. Two people face each other. One begins to move, the other follows his or her movements. At some point they switch roles, the first person is now the follower. By moving slowly and reflecting accurately that which is being done, the “leader” feels a profound sense of being heard without saying a word. When the game gets really dynamic, you can’t tell who’s leading or following anymore, because the two people are simply moving together as if they are one. They are communicating.

Simple. Awesome. And fun.

So what happens when we start to add words? Consider Pandora’s box…

Spoken language can be both a highly effective and wildly inefficient form of communicating. The dynamics that make language work - from the way things are said, to the content and amount of words used to say them, not to mention the body language that supports them all, make the number of variables difficult to say the least. And, for the purpose of this ongoing blog, the subject of next week’s work.

— written by Robert Cochrane