The difficulty of understanding humans and the power of languages

“The same incident or experience in the external world will take on different meanings or significance to different individuals, or different cultures, depending on their internal maps.”

Knowing this, you could relatively easily understand why humans emotionally and behaviorally react differently to the same situation. 

Each internal map could contain past experience, knowledge and imagination of self, the world and the relationship between oneself and the world. In this sense, the variety of the internal maps of people you encounter is infinite, which adds a tremendous amount of difficulty to reading correctly and understanding accurately humans. 

Compounding to this complexity, human languages are not best designed or have not evolved to express and reflect our mental maps within few sentences. And each language has its own uniquely implicit and explicit meanings, which could be missed or misunderstood in cross-cultural conversations especially! 

So each time you talk to someone or write to someone, remember that the person reading it will only interpret the meaning of the sentences within his or her own mental maps. And obviously do not act so shocked when you realize what he or she reads is not what you intend to express. Because you and everyone else have absolutely different mental maps. What’s more important, none of us is a born master of languages and human psychology. 

It’s our mutual responsibility in communications to reveal our mental maps and to reduce potential misunderstandings. Pay attention to the real person in the conversations: Is he or she the same gender? What’s his or her cultural background? What’s his or her past life experiences? What’s his or her general personality type? What’s his or her trigger? What does he or she care? 

By being curious and asking questions, you could help the person to reveal his or her mental maps or even to better understand one’s own mental map. Language is the most powerful tool of human species, so use it wisely and kindly!