Human Communication

Finally, we use the term channel or medium to refer to the means by which we the message is converted and transmitted as a signal. In this book, we deal mainly with the spoken channel and the written channel. 

The above examination of communication in the abstract has of course been leading us to an explanation of how human communication operates. Taking spoken communication first, let us make a primary distinction between the two main aspects of this, which we shall call the verbal component and the prosodic component We use the term verbal to mean the part of human communication to with words. In some books, the term verbal and language are synonymous, but because language has so many other, potentially confusable meanings, we will stick with the 

From this basic model, we can now explore some of the ftmdamental features of language. In doing so, we follow Hockett [214], who stated the principal defining properties of verbal langnage. Among these are the following. 

The duality principle states that verbal language is not one system but two the first system uses a small inventory of forms, phonemes, which sequentially combine to form a much larger inventory of words. The phonemes don t carry meaning but the words do, and this association is arbitrary. The second system combines the large number of words into an effectively limitless number of sentences. 

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About 7% of men and 0.5% of women perceive colors in significantly different ways and individuals do not perceive colors identically. Older people perceive colored surfaces as having less chromatic content than do younger ones. For this reason, human communication about colors is based on different codes. 

Kitamura,T. 2006. Electronic paper for human communication and environmental protection. Oyo Butsuri 75 995-999. 

This hypothesis is, at present, pure speculation. There is nothing other than circumstantial evidence to support it. However, it does provide an explanation for several unique features of human communication behaviour and, in doing so, it brings together into the same explanatory framework a number of hitherto unrelated facts. On these grounds alone, it clearly merits more detailed investigation. 

A major reason for this lies in methodological problems connected with the observation and description and the nature of human behaviour itself. In order to asses causation and function of behaviour we rely on an observational device. The process of information reduction which is applied to the study of behaviour results in highly variable observations. The assessment of meaning and function rarely produces reproducible results, and different signals especially in human communication seem to take many meanings which are context-specific. Partially this might be due to the observational approaches used for coding behaviour. 

Figure 4.7 Global distribution of complex-17 isolates in various cities (dots). The numbers indicate the type of epidemiologic source of the sample whereby 1 = animal isolates, 2 = human community surveillance isolates, 3 = isolates from surveillance (feces) from hospital patients, 4 = human clinical isolates, 5 = isolates from documented hospital outbreaks. The number of isolates in each instance is indicated in parentheses. (From Willems et al., 2005.)...

In theory, the existence within our secular society of a group that does not accept conventional values is consistent with our political vision. But one of the great problems of the United States, legally and politically, is that we have never quite had the courage of our convictions. The Republic is founded on the marvelously sane principle that a human community can exist and prosper only on a basis of mutual trust. Metaphysically, the American Revolution was a rejection of the dogma of Original Sin, which is the notion that because you cannot... 

The emergence of professional and public interest in psychedelic substances coincides with the shift in human communication from the chirographic-typographic to the electronic stage. Just as electronic devices have begun to... 

Human Communication Investigated With Magnetoencephalography Speech, Music, and... 

The term codes, or conventions, normally indicates the rules which are adopted by a human community, but it has also a wider meaning. 

If the natural world, however shaped by human use, is too unwieldy in its raw form for administrative manipulation, so too are the actual social patterns of human interaction with nature bureaucratically indigestible in their raw form. No administrative system is capable of representing any existing social community except through a heroic and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification. It is not simply a question of capacity, although, like a forest, a human community is surely far too complicated and variable to easily yield its secrets to bureaucratic formulae. It is also a question of purpose. State agents have no interest—nor should they—in describ-... 

A full appreciation of the toll of forced resettlement in Ethiopia extends far beyond the standard reports of starvation, executions, deforestation, and failed crops. The new settlements nearly always failed their inhabitants as human communities and as units of food production. The very fact of massive resettlement nullified a precious legacy of local agricultural and pastoral knowledge and, with it, some thirty to forty thousand functioning communities, most of them in regions that had regularly produced food surpluses. 

The planned "scientific city," laid out according to a small number of rational principles, was experienced as a social failure by most of its inhabitants. Paradoxically, the failure of the designed city was often averted, as was the case in Brasilia, by practical improvisations and illegal acts that were entirely outside the plan. Just as the stripped-down logic behind the scientific forest was an inadequate recipe for a healthy, successful forest, so were the thin urban-planning schemata of Le Corbusier an inadequate recipe for a satisfactory human community. 

Proponents of this view forget or ignore, I think, the fact that in order to do its work, the market requires its own vast simplifications in treating land (nature) and labor (people) as factors of production (commodities). This, in turn, can and has been profoundly destructive of human communities and of nature. In a sense, the simplification of the scientific forest compounds the simplification of scientific measurement and the simplification made possible by the commercial market for wood. Karl Polanyi s classic, The Great Transformation (Boston Beacon Press, 1957), is still perhaps the best case against pure market logic. 

With the development of the human brain, a functional network with over 100 billion interrelated nerve cells and 1010 bit capacity arose. With this system, whose operation is inseparably connected to conscious perception, life on earth reached its most sophisticated form. Furthermore, the human being, who is primarily a social creature, is a building block in the creation of a gigantic product human society. The function and capacity of society obviously exceeds the sum of the activity of its members. Based on the practically inexhaustible capacity of the human brain to acquire drives, human society represents a qualitatively new, higher form of life. For example, a country, presently the most sophisticated form of a human community, consists of millions or even over a billion humans and operates de facto as a huge living complex interacting with other similar entities, about 200 at present. 

The development of the ancient human community was driven similarly by unexpected, brilliant discoveries and ingenious inventions made by talented individuals. Domestication of animals is a good illustration of this. Somebody realized by chance that the behavior of a wild animal can be manipulated, and this discovery initiated the long process that ultimately led to the breeding of properly domesticable strains. 

Traditional medicine dating back to the dawn of human civilization witnessed another main line of discoveries that improved significantly the quality of life of human communities. A couple of those ancient discoveries laid the foundation of modern pharmacology as it developed thousands of years later. 

From the moment of its inception, the myths-based human community has undergone a progressive transformation. It still seeks its final state of equilibrium a society, the organization of which is fully based on rationality, on the knowledge of the natural laws that keep the brain and its self operating. 

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