Maintaining the Bandwidth of Virtual Conversations

I’ve talked a lot about the bandwidth differences between conscious and non-conscious sense-making and decision-making, as well as the bandwidth difference between verbal and non-verbal communication. It’s not the 9 to 1 ratio that you sometimes hear bandied about as the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge. According to brain research, it’s more like 800,000 to 1.

Carol Kinsey Goman’s latest book is The Nonverbal Advantage: Secrets and Science of Body Language at Work. In a new essay called “Face to Face,” She reminds us how much of that bandwidth is used to read body language for all the context that it adds to the explicit text of conversations. It’s why we start learning to read body language much earlier in childhood than we learn spoken language.