Hi, good question.
One of the tid bits of information I learned early in my writing
career is that "communication is what is heard, not what is said."
The mind, for all its wondrous abilities and capabilities is really,
when dealing with the outside world, simply a pattern recognition
machine. For instance a child "knows" what language it speaks before
it is 8 weeks old. Japanese children by this time are paying more
attention to "w" sounds and less attention to "r" sounds. USA children
are not paying attention to many of the vowel sounds that Russian or
Dane children are hearing and learning to produce.
When we learn new bits of information we generally learn faster if we
can apply the new to something we already know. For instance 4 + 4 is
8, we already know, learning to multiply we can start by learning that
4 * 3 is the same as 4 + 4 + 4.
When two people approach each other, what you call a "sieve" is a mesh
of these patterns, several thousand patterns, flooding through the
mind as each evaluate the other, the situation, the time of day,
personal problems, current events, clothing, sex, stature, posture and
the personal desire of each individual as being what they want out of
this conversation.
Most of these patterns are "common" (been seen before) and the
reaction to these "common" patterns can be a description of
"personality".
Some of these patterns are not "common" and the mind will begin to
filter them and try to match them up to more "common" patterns already
known. In doing this, mis-evaluation may occur. i.e.. "It looks like a
duck, it quacks like a duck and it walks like a duck, so it must be a
duck" doesn't always work. Cultural differences are a good example of
this, for example; belching after dinner.
With all of our histories so various it really is amazing that we can
communicate with each other at all. A common language helps, but even
in the same country variations of accepted definitions can be extreme
from one border to the other.
Links of interest.
What is the Sex of your Brain?
http://www.genderweb.org/general/brains.petal
How little gray cells process sound
http://www.washington.edu/newsroom/news/1997archive/11-97archive/k112197.html
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Researchers in child language acquisition have often observed that the
child learns language apparently without the benefit of explicit
negative evidence [Braine, 1971; Bowerman, 1983; Pinker, 1989]. This
introduces the following problem: if the child is never told that a
particular utterance is incorrect, how does he or she learn not to
utter it, while still learning to produce correct sentences that have
also never been heard? How will he or she know which of these
sentences that have never been heard are correct, and which are
incorrect? In other words, how does the child know not to
overgeneralize from the utterances heard, if nothing has been
explicitly ruled out?
----
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/ftp/global/pub/techreports/1992/tr-92-062.ps.gz
Non-Verbal Interpersonal Communications
http://www.mapnp.org/library/commskls/non_vrbl/non_vrbl.htm
"Coping with Music Performance Anxiety"
http://www.uwec.edu/counsel/pubs/musicanxiety.htm
I know that last one probably looks like it doesn't belong at first,
but read it through, it will help your understanding with this, if
applied to what you read before.
I hope this helps in your quest and thank you for the question.
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