Matt Richardson

Sharing thoughts...

March 26, 2005 | 1 Minute Read

Warning: deep, and possibly lacking in purpose...

On the odetocode blog, I found a pretty cool quote the other day. Its in slightly technical language, but i thought i'd share, and add my 2 cents (or is it pence?) to it:

Taking the thoughts, ideas, and emotions we have in our brain, and encoding them into an audible form, or a textual representation, is a lossy compression at best...

Its very true, cos so often, its almost impossible to get the stuff in your mind out, in a way that other people completely "get". You can get most of it out, but you always have the different connotations of things, and your past experiences and the like impact the way you interpret things. You can nevercompletely understand or look at something the exact same way another person does.

In a book I was reading recently, The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham (good book, actually), the main characters deviate from the "true image", in that they can communicate telepathically. They talk of being able to know each other in a way that ordinary people cannot, a communicate, a link at a level where you can see & know what the other person is thinking. They go on to say they feel sorry for the people who don’t have this ability, living a life where you can only see the surface.

On an understanding people level, I think that without this kind of ability, we can never truly know what’s going on inside someone, unfortunately - damn it'd be useful sometimes. (Just thinking though, would this ability be a blessing or a curse?)

From a knowledge sharing/education point of view, I think it kind of means that we have to put a lot more effort into sharing knowledge than would seem apparent on the surface.  Or is that part of the beauty of the human race? That we take some knowledge and look at it all in a fractionally different way?

Tagged: On Generalities