Ask Lemmy

I feel my mind turning off, turning to teflon, when I read your comment. It made me wonder whether others have that experience too.

Here’s something interesting: social scientists have found that humans’ eyebrows dance when they talk to each other. The eyebrow dance is normally not consciously perceived, but it is synchronized between two individuals when they speak to one another.

What’s more is the eyebrow dance is literally a dance, not a conversation, specifically in the way it is timed. It is perfectly in sync, not offset as you’d expect a back-and-forth response pattern to be.

When this eyebrow dance synchronization is inhibited, for example by covering the speaker’s eyebrows, that speaker has an incredibly hard time getting information across.

This is a long-documented phenomenon in human culture: that people can be standing there conveying information and others can be hearing it but not picking it up.

Like one person can be saying “Our car crashed! My brother is badly hurt and he needs an ambulance! Can I use your phone?” and for various reasons another person can just stand there not processing any of it.

So really what I’m trying to say is that human communication is finicky and relies on maintenance of non-obvious parallel channels, and people can get cut off from others when those channels break down.

From reading your writing, and seeing how others respond, it makes me think there might be some channel based on word sequencing that’s not being adhered to.

I know from experience how much it sucks to be cut off and unseen, so I thought I’d point out for you that while I recognize what you’re saying is important, it doesn’t land in my feelings for some reason, and it feels related to how things are worded.