How We See the World

In the world of technical communication, we seek to reach others, to bring knowlege and to impart information, and we do this through the use of stimuli - visual, auditory and tactile stimuli, chosen to elicit a desired response. In order to reach any audience, we must often expand their frame of reference. Often, this requires the tech comm professional to step out of their own surroundings and seek to understand and anticipate the needs of their audience.

Many times, people have been conditioned to do or to understand a idea in a particular way, so they eventually come to believe that there is only one way of "doing." As an illustration of the types and degrees of conditioning that you may encounter in your work, consider an experiment performed at Harvard University by the team of scientists led by Hubel and Weisel in the late 70's. Known as the Kitten Experiment, (seen here in a video illustrated by Deepak Chopra), the results of the experiment illustrate how profound a difference conditioning can cause in a living organism.