Your Mind on Context
Attention isn't enough. Your mind needs a way to find meaning in what you experience.
In this series, we’re following the path an idea takes from the outside world (a conversation, for example) into the mind, where it becomes a memory. Each step reveals something that helps us become better explainers.
We want to know: what is necessary for information to become a memory?
Two things should be clear, based on recent posts:
Everything we know about the world around us comes from our senses. If we can’t see, hear, taste, touch, or smell it, it’s not there. Read more.
We can only pay attention to a fraction of what we sense. What gets our attention is usually something meaningful. Read more.
Today, we’re adding a layer that helps answer an inevitable question: where does meaning come from?
Does a Broken Cup Matter?
Take a second and look around you. This is your current context, and it influences how you think. An office has a work context. The bedroom has a sleep context.
Our minds depend on context from the outside world to understand and adapt to what we experience. A knife in the bedroom means something different compared to a knife in the kitchen.
Think about an object, like a coffee cup, and imagine it being accidentally broken. On its own, it’s just a broken cup with little meaning. Who cares?
But to your family, the cup has meaning. It was your grandmother’s favorite, and seeing it broken was an emotional experience.
This simple example makes an important point: meaning comes from context. This is true at home, in the office, and in relationships. The object, idea, or person matters, but meaning comes from how they relate to the bigger picture.
The problem: context is often invisible.
Your First Party
Imagine the idea of “house party” being new to you. You have no expectations, and your first party is a formative and tiring experience. Your night is spent observing others and understanding the idea of “party”. It’s a lot to take in.
Without context, nothing in your mind tells you what to do or how to behave. So you have to build that knowledge from scratch, which is distracting. You notice that parties are convivial and include lots of people talking. Most of them are drinking alcohol and eating snacks.
You don’t realize it, but the event is being filed away in the back of your mind as a new context. Party = people, alcohol, and snacks. Context is slowly becoming clear.
Your Second Party
Your mind now holds the concept of “party” and creates a shortcut that prevents you from having to learn it all over again.
When you walk into the second party, the context clicks into place, and your mind automatically tunes into the items that you noticed previously. You scan the room for people you know. You notice the location of the bar and snack table.
You didn’t have to think, “Look for people and alcohol.” Your attention went there automatically. Why? Because the context informed your attention.
The “party” context focused your attention on what is meaningful. You didn’t even notice the sculpture by the door, or the bistro lights in the kitchen. Context focuses attention.
Why Does this Matter?
Much of what we experience is high in context. Our homes, vehicles, work, relationships, etc., are mostly stable. We know what’s meaningful and take this sense for granted.
We also encounter a lot that is low in context. We see headlines that have little meaning. We enter conversations without knowing what’s been said. We watch movies with no expectations. Finding meaning in these situations is hard work.
The role of the explainer is based, in part, on supplying the context needed for helping people see meaning. We recognize situations where the right context can make all the difference.
The Reality for Explainers
Explanations often fail because of a lack of context. Without it, your audience might remember facts and figures, but not understand the big picture. They see the mug, but not the grandma, and it’s confusing.
Many communicators end up skipping essential context and moving directly to content. Why?
The culprit here is the Curse of Knowledge. The more you know about a subject, the harder it is to imagine NOT knowing. The curse interferes with our ability to make accurate assumptions about what the audience knows, or not.
We assume the context is obvious because it’s obvious to us. So we skip it. We don’t make the context clear to others, and it remains invisible. When this happens, the audience has to work harder to find the meaning that will keep their attention.
I made this video to explain an interesting experiment that illustrates the curse.
The Solution
Think of your audience being like the person entering a party for the first time. They have no context and must build a sense of meaning.
As an explainer, your job is to help build the shortcut they need to find meaning. By explaining the idea of “party”, you can help them build expectations about the party, what matters, and why it matters. With this information, they can skip the costly building and enjoy the party for what it is.
These explanations do something important: they lower the cost of understanding. They provide the audience with context at the beginning so that meaning and relevance are clearer. When the cost is lower, learning feels easier.
As we’ll see, context is not an addition or a helpful ingredient in how we think. Rather, it is an essential part of how we perceive the world around us. It works seamlessly with our senses and how we pay attention. When information arrives in our bubbles, context is automatically there to help.
And we have a role to play in this by filling in contextual blanks.
Up Next:
As always, the driving question is: How do we know? What is the evidence that supports my claims about context?
There is real science about the role context plays in our minds, and we’ll be taking a closer look at how context helps ideas move through the gauntlet of the mind.
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