Communication

This Blog Post was originally published on the platform "writelier" (formerly "co-writers" and "200wordsaday"). Sadly the blogging platform was discontinued. I downloaded all my blog posts and prepared them to be republish them here.

Recently I was listening to the podcast "Rettungsdienst.FM" two german men (an anaesthetist and a paramedic) talking about ambulance service stuff. Diseases, problems that arise in the ambulance services and other related topics.

This time the podcast was around communication. Between paramedics and doctors and more importantly about how paramedics and doctors talk to patients.

I think it is no surprise that it is really complicated to communicate. Not only in the emergency area but also in every area where communication is key.

You have to find the fine grade of not using excessive medical jargon and delivering enough information that the patient knows about his situation. In addition, you can not talk to children or dementia patients the same as you would talk to other adults.

A really complex topic. In the hour-long episode a few really interesting facts about the human brain. I'm not a specialist on the topic so I hope they did their research good enough. :)

Also, I hope I translated it correctly from german to English.

Everything that stimulates the brain (the five senses, processes inside the body [breathing, heartbeat]) produces a workload of 10^9 Bit per second. Dived that are 120 Megabytes of Data every second.

For the ones who don't have that much knowledge about data. 120 Megabytes could be related to 80 or 100 mp3s.

I know we are living in the Gigabyte and Terrabyte years, even Petabyte if you look at large Data Warehouses. But let me continue.

The brain can't handle that much information per second. So all that information is reduced to 10^2 Bit per Second. 12.5 Byte per second. Thinking about this makes it now easy to guess why it is so hard for humans to read body language and interpret.

The information would be there, but it isn't processable. But I am not finished yet. :)

With that 12.5 Byte, the brain is resonating, associating and reminding. Which leads to 10^2 Bit of Data per second (1.2 Megabyte) (about 36 Terrabyte per Year).

So roughly speaking our brain can handle one audio track in mp3 form per second.

No wonder communication is one of the hardest things for ourselves.

Another interesting fact, the brain can react to about 400 words per minute and understand them. But we can only speak about 120 words per minute.

For me, it was a really interesting episode. You can find it here, but as I've written you should know german to understand them. :)