Can You Hear Me Read online

  By now, you won’t be surprised to learn that no one except you pays attention on conference calls.12 Of course you do. Those hilarious anecdotes you’ve heard about people doing silly, random, and disgusting things while muted on a conference call?

  They’re doing those things because they’re completely disengaged from that important call you scheduled for Monday morning to kick the week off right at each of your crucial centers around the globe.

  True confession: I started casting—if that’s the right word—

  tarot cards while on innumerable conference calls. And I’m not a believer. Just to pass the time. Until I discovered pacing and lifting free weights. Now I’m trying to get in shape while half-

  listening to all those calls.

  Strangely, doodling helps you pay attention.13 Maybe that’s because doodling engages your unconscious mind.

  Maybe you should doodle while texting. Researchers recently found that the more you rely on texting to sustain your roman-tic relationships, the less satisfying those relationships are.14 But don’t be texting while in a meeting—three-quarters of your coworkers find it annoying, no matter how cleverly you try to disguise what you’re doing.15 We can tell.

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  Of course, people think they communicate more clearly over email than they actually do.16 Tone is very hard to communicate; there’s emotion rearing its pesky head again. As John Medina, a molecular biologist with a PhD and the author of Brain Rules, notes, we don’t pay attention to boring things. Vision trumps the other senses. But even video calls are sensory-poor experiences compared with face-to-face encounters, because of the air pressure, the smells, the ambient sound in the room. All the sensory input of all five senses and a few more that we’re only just beginning to learn about are condensed or eliminated on video.17

  We were meant to communicate face-

  to-face, outdoors, in constant motion

  As Medina says, “the human brain appears to have been designed to solve problems related to surviving in an outdoor setting, in unstable meteorological conditions, and to do so in near-constant motion.” That’s what fully engages our senses and our unconscious minds. None of those conditions are usually present or optimal in the digital world. And, he continues, people “ought to really understand that the brain processes meaning before it processes detail. It wants the meaning of what it is that you’re talking about before it wants the detail of what it is you’re talking about.”18 In other words, we want to know why first and then how or what.

  According to neuroscientists, when the brain encounters something new, which is a good deal of our waking life, it starts to ask questions. It immediately queries the inputs it receives from the outside world with six essential concerns—all to do, not surprisingly, with survival. Will it eat me? Can I eat it?

  Can I have sex with it? Can it have sex with me? Have I seen it before? Have I never seen it before? Can you imagine how the Introduction.indd 7

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  8 Can You Hear Me?

  third-quarter financial numbers compete on a conference call with those other questions running around subconsciously in the participants’ minds?

  Finally, the unconscious mind craves the big picture—the sort of overview you might have gotten in caveperson days from an outcropping a hundred yards above the savanna—and, at the same time, refuge. The safety of the cave. The virtual world, by putting us into our heads, gives us neither overview nor refuge.19

  Virtual communication engenders five big problems seldom encountered in person

  The first big problem with virtual communication is the lack of feedback. This is the problem from which all the rest of the problems in the virtual world flow. Humans (in an evolutionary sense) are relatively feeble creatures. We run the risk of falling victim to lots of bigger animals with paws and teeth that can reduce us to dinner with a swipe or a bite. So, we evolved to be prediction junkies and became adept at scouting out patterns.

  We want to know, always, what’s going to happen next, and we want to know, does that shadow mean a tiger is lurking over there?

  Our brains constantly scan the spaces around us, looking for danger patterns and making predictions. We use the five senses that we’re aware of, and others that only our unconscious minds keep track of, like sensing the way the air changes around us when other humans or animals are drawing near.

  The virtual world usually deprives us of most of those sources of sensory information. We simply don’t get the feedback we’re used to getting constantly and analyzing continuously. Our brains respond by filling up the sensory data with memories, Introduction.indd 8

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  made-up stuff, and anxiety. And thus we find the virtual world repetitive, confusing, and tension-filled. We suffer in the virtual world primarily because of the lack of sensory feedback.

  The second big problem is related to the first: the lack of empathy. Because we get little information in virtual communication, we learn little about how other people are feeling. The mirror neurons that normally send us constant data about other people’s emotions are deprived of the sensory feed, and so they once again make it up. You start to imagine that the person on the other end of that email is angry at you, because you don’t really know what the person is thinking.

  This lack of information, and the resulting misinformation filling the pipeline, lead us to poor or incorrect analyses of other people’s emotional states. Our normal high levels of empathy are reduced or rendered inaccurate.

  A side issue of the lack of empathy is that the virtual world is less interesting, since a big part of what engages our time and attention in the real world is figuring out what other people are feeling. And so, in the virtual world, attention spans are shorter, maybe as short as ten minutes.20 But habit dictates that meetings are usually scheduled in hour-long segments, some even longer.

  Our meetings, especially virtual ones, are outstripping our attention spans.

  The third big problem is the lack of control over your own persona. This problem develops in the virtual emotional desert. Because the virtual world is arranged largely by and for machines, it can remember everything. This capacity means that you leave endless digital footprints everywhere you go. In the real world, people forget and forgive. In the virtual world, as many job applicants have found, all those embarrassing photos from your wild college parties are still out there, ripe for the harvesting.

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  As we’ll see, you can manage your virtual persona to a certain extent, but on the whole, it’s as if every step you ever took were memorialized in wet cement as you ventured forth. The virtual world is the wet cement for every digital step you take.

  The fourth big problem is the lack of emotion. The human mind is constantly assessing its surroundings and the intent of all the people within its ken. Take away the emotional subtext, and an odd thing happens: we have a hard time making decisions. Most of us believe we made decisions as Mr. Spock did.

  That is, we think consciously and logically and make decisions accordingly. But a good deal of neuroscience has clearly established that we make decisions in our unconscious minds, basing them on memories and on emotions.21 As a result, our ability to decide things in the virtual world is severely constricted. We have a hard time deciding, we make faulty decisions on scanty or misinterpreted data, and we end up tuning out altogether.

  For example, we’ve all experienced the mess we can make with one misinterpreted email, where somebody imagines a tone that we didn’t intend. The same thing can happen in an audioconference. Does the silence in response to what you’ve just said mean that everyone is in rapt agreement or that everyone is tuned out—or that people are on mute so that they can have a party? You don’t know, you can’t decide, and it’s all to
o much hard work.

  And the last big problem is the lack of connection—and commitment. Humans crave connection, and the virtual world seems endlessly social. But real connection, like decision making, is based on emotions. Take the emotions out, and we feel alone more often than makes sense. The bonding that naturally happens when people meet face-to-face and size each other up, fall in love, find mutual interests, and so on, is lacking. And thus with thousands of Twitter followers, oodles of Instagram and Introduction.indd 10

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  Facebook friends, and a huge LinkedIn community, we’re still left endlessly chasing the junk food of connection online—likes, clicks, and links that give us a passing thrill but no real sense of connection like a hug.

  As a result, a formidable issue for us humans is that online commitment—trust—is fragile. Trolling (nasty, unproductive baiting and name-calling) is rampant. The whole emotional life of the online world is, in short, a train wreck for the way the human mind actually works.

  I’ll address these five problems in more detail in the next five chapters and then offer some commonsense solutions in the concluding chapters, which look at various methods of virtual communication. First, a couple of caveats. These five problems overlap, of course. Because they concern human psychology, they’re messy and not cleanly divided. The lack of feedback and the resultant decrease in empathy; the loss of control over virtual information; diminished emotion, which hurts decision making; and the fragile commitments and trust from a lack of connection are all, well, interconnected. But they are distinct and important enough to warrant separate discussions in subsequent chapters.

  And finally, we are in the early days of research. Writing this book, I was constantly encountering new studies that might affect what I would say. I’ve been frustrated by the lack of strong research in other areas. We have thousands more questions than answers about virtual communications. And I’ve been struck by how one study may undercut another because there is no definitive position on a particular issue. Our present knowledge about the brain and communications may not be what we know later. Indeed, one neuroscientist said to me in an off-the-record comment as I was conducting the interview, “We know nothing about the brain.”

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  Of course, he meant “nothing for certain,” yet his obser-

  vation is a healthy reminder to proceed with caution. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t make some essential, enduring observations about the main—and glaring—problems with virtual communications and begin to suggest what to do about them.

  Now back to that videoconference. Why did it feel like such hard work? A brief analysis of how face-to-face communication works will help answer those questions I asked at the beginning.

  If you want to get right to the five problems, then this would be a good time to jump to chapter 1.

  Emotional truth is as important in

  communications as intellectual truth

  We humans learned to communicate when we dressed in skins, fought with clubs, and talked in grunts. The human community was a frail group arrayed against monsters like woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats. Speed of reaction was essential.

  Instant reading of intent—correctly—meant the difference between life and death. We learned to communicate quickly, unconsciously, and simply.

  We based our reactions on what we learned about humans and other animals, recognizing patterns and acting on them instantly to keep on living. To keep those patterns—and memories of those patterns—fresh, we ordered them in a hierarchy of importance determined by emotional tags. The most frightening things we remembered best. Every day, our brains learned to scrub away the less emotional memories to start again, retaining the patterns and Introduction.indd 12

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  memories that seemed the most important—the most scary, closely followed by relevance to food, shelter, sex, and the other essentials.

  That was 300,000 years ago. Things didn’t change much for roughly 299,900 years. Then humans started communicating virtually. As we’ll explore in more depth in the following pages, virtual communications unintentionally stripped out most of the emotional structure of face-to-face communications, while making it much easier to connect with more people faster and with less effort.

  The result? We were soon both overwhelmed and bored.

  When humans communicate face-to-face, we do so with little conscious effort most of the time. Even when language is a barrier, we can quickly get the gist of the idea through body language, facial expression, and the emotion conveyed. When we communicate at a distance, the effort involved is considerable and the opportunities for miscommunication are multiplied.

  Face-to-face communication is the norm for human behavior, even though it is getting hard to remember ever living life without a mobile phone. We evolved over millennia to communicate quickly, efficiently, and easily face-to-face. What happens when you put that fabulous organic communicating machine to work in a virtual environment?

  The virtual environment is disastrous for our normal modes of communicating

  Picture a worker in a cubicle. Gray walls, gray chair, gray computer. Gray hum of background noise all around. When she picks up the phone, the way the voice is processed over that instrument cuts out most of the emotion. That’s why telephone calls and webinars are so boring. No emotion.

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  Now stretch that picture out, day after day, month after month, year after year. Is it any wonder that 70 percent of your workers are either actively disengaged or not engaged, according to the last Gallup poll?22 Another recent study found that regular face-to-face communication cuts the risk of depression in adults by half. Phone and email don’t have the same effect.23

  Our unconscious minds need to get together so that they can find the emotional connections they crave. We humans are social beings. We don’t do well when deprived of our fellow humans.

  We need to feed that unconscious mind, and we starve it at our peril as employers, as employees, as humans. We need face-to-face.

  The virtual world is impoverished for us humans. We haven’t had time—evolutionary time—to change to accommodate the communication shift of the past half century.

  We are lost, bored, and alone.

  Let’s go a little deeper. What are some of the most important missing pieces? Think about how a normal face-to-face conversation goes. You use eye contact at the beginning to make sure you’ve got the other person’s attention, and then you launch into that story about the drunk dog. You start looking up, down, and sideways for inspiration, to recall the tale, and simply to give your listener a break. Then, when you’re ready to wrap up and hand the conversational baton off to your partner, you check back in with the person with a clear signal of eye contact to say, “Almost done. Get ready.”

  Without eye contact, we have a hard time talking Eye contact is thus an important regulator of communication.

  And it’s almost entirely missing from the virtual world.

  What other areas of communication are important to face-to-face conversations—and what are the perils in the virtual world? Let’s start with email, since that’s where the digital world Introduction.indd 14

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  really took off. The digital era began, arguably, with email and the attempt to solve two particular problems with older forms of communication: time and money. Letters, memos, and other forms of written communication, such as reports and white papers, were full of what the Silicon Valley calls friction—they were hard to create and cost money. And face-to-face communications required that busy schedules be synchronized. The engineers and scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and in the defense indu
stry wanted communication that was both frictionless and asynchronous.

  The first email proper was sent in 1971 over something called ARPANET as a way for university researchers and defense contrac-tors to share information that met the two criteria. Both problems were solved, and the digital era began. Communication became frictionless and asynchronous, and Pandora’s digital box had opened.

  Why did these laudable efforts eventually produce an emotional train wreck for the rest of us? In solving the problems of time and money, digital communication unintentionally created two other problems: we gradually became awash in email, and most of it was boring. But there lurked a deeper problem that only became apparent once we were firmly ensconced in the digital era (and the thrill of new technology had worn off): the emotional components of the letter (or even the telegraph) were stripped away. In exchange for asynchronous, frictionless communication, we got information overload and the emotional banality of the always-on social media era.

  But it gets worse.

  The main work of our minds is unconscious Our minds are driven mostly by unconscious processes.24 We get an unconscious thought or desire. We make an unconscious Introduction.indd 15

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  decision. Then our bodies act on that decision, and only after that do our conscious minds catch up, notice what’s going on, and take credit for what just happened. The mind edits out any awareness of the lag between unconscious impulse and conscious thought, presumably so we won’t have to experience the vertigo of finding our bodies acting without our prior conscious knowledge.

  That unconscious mind can analyze something like eleven million bits of information per second, while our conscious minds can only process about forty.25 The unconscious mind has thus taken over most of our thought processes to keep us alive and safe. We react with our bodies milliseconds before our minds would even notice danger, saved by the split-second, lifesaving decisions of the unconscious. Like former president George W. Bush, who famously dodged an errant shoe thrown at him by a disgruntled Iraqi reporter at a news conference in the Green Zone, we move before we think. And that’s a good thing.