communication is processing

Talking and writing are not nearly as much about communication as we think. That's part of it, of course. But a significant portion, often the majority, of the value comes from how speaking or writing a though forces us to clarify it in our own minds.

By speaking something aloud, or writing it down, we are forced to commit to a set of abstractions to with which describe our thoughts or experiences (remember, all words are abstractions). We commit to a linearization: an ordering of concepts, a way to tell the story. And we often commit to a 'take', an opinion or judgement on what happened. When someone asks me 'how was your trip to Japan?', I will tell them where I went, and what I liked, and what I didn't like, even though in most cases my actual experience was much richer than the simple notions of 'like' or 'didn't like'. In the process of explaining I will commit to a compressed representation of the experience: what parts to keep and what to throw away. Since we can't remember raw experience, the compressed version is what will actually get remembered.

A testable prediction of this thesis is that, after reading a paper or book, writing about that paper (or trying to explain it to one) will increase comprehension and retention. life conclusion: any paper (/book) worth reading is worth writing about and/or talking about with someone.

Beyond experiences: there is a similar effect if someone asks you for your opinion on a political subject, or even how your day was at work. In the first case, your response reflects an opportunity to practice articulating and connecting your views. In the second case, you have a chance to surface things that went well, or badly, and think about things you could change.

A corollary of the above is that if we don't communicate our experiences, we may not remember them. This feels very true to me: I wonder if there's support for it in the psychological literature?

As an introverted kid I didn't understand this phenomenon. I thought of communication as communication: you say something if you have something to say, and if you don't have anything smart to say, it's better to keep quiet, lest you pollute the discourse. It would be uncouth to talk about mundane or unimportant things: daily life, gossip about people, etc. And certainly I would never ask someone a question I wasn't genuinely curious about the answer to. To do that would be horribly inauthentic!

What I didn't understand is that asking people about themselves and their experiences is at least partly a form of emotional labor: by giving them the opportunity to talk about themselves, you're giving them the opportunity to process their experiences. It's a necessary cognitive function (this is at least part of why humans do not do well in solitary confinement). Helping someone perform it is a mitzvah: a token of friendship, even if you aren't inherently interested in how someone's trip was. Though after a while, once you get in the habit of asking such questions, you might find it hard to distinguish the habit itself from genuine interest.

This is also the principle behind therapy. Talking about yourself forces processing that can be valuable even if the therapist themselves never serves as anything more than a blank slate.

The processing involved in talking is part of why being yourself takes practice. You may have scores of unorganized thoughts that influence your identity, but to really make them reliable parts of yourself, you have to practice articulating them: finding the story to tell, the words to use, the relationship between ideas.

This is also the principle behind 'rubber duck debugging'. Explaining a problem to a colleague is often enough to force you to clarify your own assumptions and see something you'd previously missed.