Ouch

[unixronin]

From Yahoo Finance:

Only a small percentage of communication involves actual words: 7%, to be exact.  In fact, 55% of communication is visual (body language, eye contact) and 38% is vocal (pitch, speed, volume, tone of voice).  The world's best business communicators have strong body language: a commanding presence that reflects confidence, competence, and charisma.

So we Aspies can count on getting across the 7% that is verbal, plus probably some varying fraction of the 38% that is vocal. The somatic 55%, we can mostly write off as lost. If we assume that on average we're getting half of the vocal content, we're getting about 26% of the total communication bandwidth ... barely more than a quarter of the total gestalt.  Even if we get all of the vocal and some fraction of the somatic, we still don't get much over 50% of the total stream.

No wonder we have trouble communicating.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

True. I was trying not to over-analyse the problem.