Throughout the history of civilization, many great minds offered notable words about the value of silence. Some opinions saw the proverbial bigger picture – the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu remarked, “Silence is a source of great strength” – while some were more facetious in their advice – humorist Will Rogers quipped, “Never miss a good chance to shut up” – and others pointed out the overlap between silence and emotional frailty – writer William S. Burroughs said, “Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.”
The concept of silence within today’s digital age of instant messaging was examined by Stelios Stavrianos, founder and CEO of Stamford’s The CoreBev Group, during the recent TEDxHartford event in Hartford.
“Silence can be so strange,” said Stavrianos. “We’re not used to it anymore. Twenty years ago, we were still writing letters to one another. Sometimes we wouldn’t hear back for months. Now, we write an email in the morning and expect to hear back by the afternoon or on the same time period. We called one another – you didn’t know who was on the other line before you answered and sometimes they can leave your message. Today, we get sent a message instantly. We can even see the exact moment someone’s read our message.”
To emphasize his point, Stavrianos held up his cell phone, peeked at its screen and declared, “Oh, look, message read five minutes ago. Why haven’t they come back to me?”
Stavrianos noted the transition from the “more analog” past to today’s digital state of immediate messaging has created changes in how people adapt to new environments – but this evolution comes with new problems.
“Our brains are highly adaptable, a quality known as neuroplasticity,” he continued. “Repeated behaviors in our brain can strengthen certain pathways. And if our behaviors consistently lean towards impatience, due to the influence of technology, it can result in reshaping these pathways over time, making our impatience more of a default setting.”
Stavrianos observed that social media and other online communication platforms “often leverage dopamine driven feedback loops” that create a reward motivation for the user if there is an instant response to a posting or message.
“When we come to expect these quick hits of pleasure, it can make waiting for longer term rewards feel much less appealing,” he warned. “Advancement in technology has literally rewired our brains, making us less patient and more demanding of the immediate. With all this change happening in our brains, we now feel the need to respond fast to communicate quickly.”
For Stavrianos, this has warped how people interact, often forcing people to engage in and expect immediate communications while becoming anxious if a speedy reply is not forthcoming. The role of silence within a realm of constant communications has made people uncomfortable.
During his presentation, Stavrianos recalled a Harvard University study where people were given the choice of sitting in a room for 15 minutes in complete silence – the only option for breaking the silence was to push a button that would result in a jolt of electricity into their bodies. The people in the experiments received a jolt prior to the start of the experiment, so they knew what to expect. But half of the people in the experiment opted to push the button and get electrocuted rather than be forced to endure 15 minutes of silence.
“People are uncomfortable in silence – we look to break silence whenever we feel a void,” Stavrianos stated.
In order to gain a greater understanding about the discomfort surrounding silence, Stavrianos said he devoted much of his free time over the past four years to researching how silence can benefit the communications process.
“To answer these questions, I interviewed dozens of experts ranging from speech language pathologist, neurologists, and even FBI hostage negotiators,” he recalled. “One common theme that speech language pathologists find is that people typically don’t give their communication partner enough time to respond. They teach to make strong eye contact, and to look your communication partner in the face to pick up on cues when it’s okay to start speaking again. Very simple techniques. But in today’s modern age of communication, it’s nearly impossible to do that over text or an email. And it’s even sometimes challenging to do over phone call or video call. A great amount of miscommunication happens via nontraditional methods, via modern methods, when emphasis on tone and facial expressions are entirely absent.”
“Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned from speech language pathology is that silence is learned, not innate,” he continued. “That means we’re born being bad listeners. And if silence is learned, that means it’s a skill, somewhat of its own language. Something we need to practice and get better at. It we’re always speaking, then we’re not listening. Silence gives someone permission to say what they want.”
From his interviews with FBI hostage negotiators, Stavrianos learned that in a “tense environment where every word you said mattered, then sometimes the words you didn’t say were even more important.” He admitted it took “incredibly strong willpower to just be quiet and let the person speak. Thus, silence is a critical component of hostage negotiation.”
Stavrianos admitted that one doesn’t need to be a hostage negotiator to apply their skills to daily communications. He recommended that people learn to pause and not to be in a constant state of speaking.
“We’re not robots,” he said. “We’re not meant to respond and communicate at the speed of light. Certainly not at the speed of modern communication. Communication is not a race. When used properly, silence gives us the power that we need to be better speakers that our listeners it allows the ones closest to us to share their feelings allows us the ability to think about what we’re going to say before we say something we don’t mean.”
