We are not aware that we talk the way our brain thinks. For example, if you are a good administrator, it’s because your brain thinks procedurally. If you feel a duty to always complete tasks, it’s because your brain thinks in terms of accomplishment. If you are good at abstract conversation, it’s because your brain thinks in an abstract manner.

This approach is different than the old version of ‘why’ people, ‘how’ people and ‘what’ people that described how people solve problems. The ‘talking’ brain approach is a combination of thought and communication – the vocalization of thought rather than the application of problem-solving.

Before we begin, mariner wants to emphasize, quite adamantly, that none of this relates to intelligence! The subject centers on persona and the manner of communicating within that persona.

To consider the relationship between brain and communication, we must be aware of our standing prejudices toward people. Politics, interpersonal experiences, and psychological comparisons easily affect our interpersonal communication but the goal here is to focus only on the influence of the brain as it attempts to communicate.

Mariner stumbled into this pop-psych approach when contemplating his own speech patterns. The two vocalization patterns that provoked this line of thought are the mariner’s inability to participate in ‘show and tell’ conversations, and secondly, the ability to listen closely to what certain people are saying. To the second pattern, a clear example is Hillary Clinton: Hillary’s accomplishments are lauded, her ethic is humanistic, and her work is thoughtful and substantive. Mariner holds her in appropriate recognition – but he cannot listen to her. After one paragraph he finds his concentration is wanting and often drifts into other thoughts. He has known this about a number of men and women over time but only recently has he noticed it as a major behavioral issue.[1]

The first pattern, conversational skills (show and tell, S&T), is most obvious at social gatherings. Everyone is eager to tell about an experience, share knowledge about things, places, and reminisce about the past. There is nothing wrong with this social sharing. Certainly it is rewarding and fulfilling to the sharing person and further is a form of inclusion and acceptance by everyone. Mariner listens . . . but mariner is not provoked to participate.

He wonders why this affect exists. Certainly he enjoys the friendship, he enjoys inclusion within the speaker’s realm, and he respects the speakers as wholesome and valuable people. He just can’t respond in kind. Most obvious in one-to-one S&T conversations, when the speaker pauses with an expectation of a response, mariner is hard pressed to continue the dialogue.

Mariner began to pay attention to his listening, speaking and thinking patterns as a unit. He began to realize that he is glib and filled with active thinking when the subject is about philosophy, sociology, cultural machinations and other broad, thematic issues. Clearly, he is not a procedural thinker. Aha! This is why he cannot listen to Hillary. Hillary is quite intently a procedural thinker. Thoughts, solutions and the attendant speech are bound to procedures rather than to the ideology that validates them. He and Hillary are of mutual intent but on different trains. All of us are bound to speak our mind – making each of us different than others and therefore susceptible to unnecessary prejudice.

These differences are important. The difference between Hillary and Bernie is how they think, ergo, how they speak about goals and objectives. The humanistic content of their speech was similar but their brains considered different perspectives for a solution.

No expert for sure but mariner has a new insight into how prejudices grow. How we receive others and categorize them is heavily dependent on their persona and the projection of that persona into speech. It is a genetically mandated behavior that we classify other individuals in some manner. It is how we treat other individuals that counts. Your brain and its accompanying communication skills have a large role to play in that treatment.

Consider how you accept the personalities on ‘Big Bang Theory’. They’re bound by the way their minds think – an element of persona that the actor must understand. Have you mentally classified them in terms of your opinion rather than accepting without judgment their persona and communication as a normal human being whose brain thinks differently than yours?

Our President, too, has an eccentric way of communicating. That eccentricity is understood only if we can understand how his brain thinks. Doing so makes us realize that his brain is damaged and incomplete.

In every moment of communication, we must acknowledge a person’s persona and communication without prejudice. If we must, we must reserve prejudice based on acts and ethics, not the way their brain talks.

Ancient Mariner

[1] We must discount Hillary’s responses to interviews because the content is written by speech writers and often is too familiar to listen to again. Nevertheless, over time and given the focus of her public service, her thoughts are fully contained in each sentence without the need for speculative content.