14 DAY TRIAL // The bus I take every morning to work happened to be extremely crowded today. As always I had bought a cup (actually a plastic glass) of coffee from the vending machine near the bus station. Because I had not finished my first cup of coffee of the morning when the bus arrived, I decided to hang on to the plastic glass. Having my morning's pleasure being carried out in a bus filled with large people didn't bother me for I was firmly squished between one of the doors and a middle aged man's large abdomen. I always carry my mp3 player around so it was only natural that this morning my coffee was, as always, accompanied by music. It's better this way. You avoid hearing all the meaningless conversations around you. The only risk in taking your music everywhere is that somebody, eventually, will try to talk to you, and I'm not talking about some guy in the street trying to pick you up or some old fart yelling at you something about the size of your bag. I'm talking about the important stuff, like: "Hey, you there! Get off the road! Bus coming!!!"
Anyway? I'm standing there, crushed between the door and the fat man, with my headphones on, trying to have my coffee, when the guy starts talking to me. At first it was impossible for me to hear anything he was saying because of my bad habit of listening to music at full power. So I take off my headphones and politely ask the man: "I beg your pardon?" The guy looks at me a bit irritated and replies: "Does this bus stop at the second stop?" Asking myself if all the loud music didn't damage my hearing after all, I pulled down even further my headphones and asked: "What?". Truly bothered by my behavior, the guy asks again, this time louder: "Does this bus stop at the second stop?" With a confused look on my face I take a break from all other cerebral activities for a moment and really focus on what the best answer could be, not only for the guy but also for me. What the man had been trying to say was: "Is the second station from here still "insert station name"?" If the question had been asked like that, I could have given the man his answer without too much fuss. But because of the way the question had been actually asked, the only logically correct reply would have been: "Yes, because this is a bus, and sooner or later, even if the driver does not whish it to be so, because it will run out of gas, it's gonna stop. And even if you do a refill, the tank is going to go empty again, and the buss will eventually stop again, for the second time. So yeah, no matter where, there will be a second stop." But, having understood what the man actually wanted to ask me, I knew I had the possibility of giving a correct answer without confusing him. Because, you see, not only had I understood what the man really wanted to know, but I also knew that the bus' route hadn't changed in years. So I was in position to give a correct answer and still help the man get off at the desired stop. I answered with a simple: "Yes". The guy seemed fairly contempt and so was I. I had of course my share of inner laugh thinking about the ups and downs of our so called ability to communicate and about the fact that haven't I had the capacity of translating the message from his language into a more manageable one the question would have been practically impossible to answer in a satisfactory manner.
Our brain doesn't need fully logical sentences to guide us in resolving the basic existential and communicational tasks. Stop from time to time and think about the way you are thinking, the actual process. I bet you rarely get to observe that. Do you use full sentences? Do you find it necessary to explain through words all the things you interact with? Most of the times, because of the fastness of our thoughts, series of logically connected affirmations that suddenly pop into your head don't take the shape of fully constructed sentences from the very beginning. It's more like a feeling you get, that you know how to explain something in a logical manner, that only later gets transformed into words. You somehow get a feeling of the words you must choose in order to logically explain something to those around you and to yourself. You can look at it like some sort of ghost word processing. The body of a word (the actual letter based structure), is too heavy to use in rapid thought process, so the brain automatically dropped it for something more efficient. Every word in our vocabulary has an image, a feeling, attached to it.
This feature manifests especially when we are asleep and the brain loses touch with the outside world that constantly requires from us explanations and reactions. When this procedure is no longer needed and our attention stops focusing on precise tasks, the true residues of our experiences surface in no particular order, breaking patterns and creating strange associations. We mostly dream images and during our dreams we experience heavy, exaggerated sensations like the impossibility to breathe, huge falls, impaired ability to run or perform tasks, and when we wake up we get a general feeling of the dream, some sharp images and strange physical sensations from time to time. These images are our personalized dictionary. Almost every time we have a conversation, especially if it's a more complex one, we constantly translate from our own language into a common one. The better our capacity of translating, more people will be able to understand our message. And if your interlocutor has the ability of going behind the translation and understand at least part of the process that influenced a certain use of words, a certain phrase structure, you might have one hell of a conversation.
It was easy for me to answer the question in the bus because I was able to relate to the guy's background, therefore, in a small amount, to his inner world of feelings and experiences used to generate the words and sentences necessary for a fairly ok interaction with other people. Chances are, though I was able to understand the guy, that his, or for that matter, other people's, ability in understanding what I'm saying be adjusted at a somewhat lower level. I mean, I was relaxed, though in a somehow anatomically uncomfortable position, willing to help, and actually took the time to think about what he was saying and give an answer. But what if next time, when I ask some random guy a question, that person will not have the same consideration and just give the answer that suits his thought pattern best, without taking into consideration my personal language and the reasons for which I'm asking, not to mention that the person might also forget to tune his/her answer to any linguistic or grammatical conventions? What could happen then? I might get off at a different stop than the one I originally intended. And that can be a real problem sometimes.
