It’s a bit of a truism that the written word is less powerful than the spoken word. Despite the presence of a few remaining Web triumphalists, it’s also generally accepted that writing found online is less profoundly moving than writing in print form. (There may be those who will argue against that last, and perhaps one or two percent of those people have a definition of writing in which writing is, a la Capote, distinguished from mere typing.)
Increasing degrees of abstraction may hold some of the reason. Events occur. The observer’s perception of those events constitutes a layer of abstraction laid atop those events. In translating and interpreting those perceptions into spoken story, the observer adds another layer, and the listener adds yet another in listening. In non-spoken storytelling, the meaning is filtered through even more layers of gauze. An alphabet (a semiotic abstraction in which silent symbols represent sounds), type an abstract interpretation of handwriting, the more formal rules of grammar assumed in written language, and the non-synchronous nature of reading a story as opposed to listening to one all increase distance from the event. They add room for a reader’s imagination, it’s true: greater leeway for reader analysis and interpretation is an emergent property of written story. Sift those printed pages into flickers of light meant to simulate — temporarily, fleetingly — a printed page, and the writing loses even more power, the writer’s intent even less relevant to what the reader takes away from it.
I just took part in an unplanned experiment which measured the relative impact of the three media: spoken word, print, and online writing. I read a story online — a detailed, well-researched piece of nonfiction science writing, then read the same story in print, and then was told that same story from memory by a person sitting next to me. The impact of each telling was remarkably different.
Reading the story online spurred moderate intellectual concern and interest. Reading the same story in print was a bit more resonant.
When I sat next to the person telling me the story in her own words, I swooned.
I mean literally. I swooned. I had to lie down, my blood pressure crashed, I felt dizzy and mildly nauseated.
True, the story concerned a not-exactly-minor surgical procedure I’ll refrain from describing here for which I’m soon scheduled. And though it hasn’t happened to me in more than 30 years it’s not the first time I’ve passed out in a hospital examining room. Or bathroom. Or hallway. It may be a form of PTSD from my childhood hobby of collecting orthopedic surgery. I don’t know.
But the facts remain. I read the gory details online, involving incisions and moving viscera around and the placement of technology and prognosis for recuperation, and my response was to think to myself “Ah. well, that makes sense. Ow. Oh well.” Reading the same information, with the same diagrams, in a pamphlet in the exam room, I thought “Huh. This doesn’t sound hugely enjoyable. But cool! I’m gonna be bionic!”
And then the surgeon sat down next to me and told me the exact same information, colored just a bit by her own experience in performing the procedure, and that same, familiar information was conveyed so, well, viscerally, that my blood pressure dropped to really rather dangerously low levels: when the nurse got to me with the cuff it was 80/50, and at that point I was feeling much better than I had been. This strong reaction came despite the calm, confident, matter-of-fact and yet thoroughly nurturing demeanor of my surgeon, and there’s a phrase you don’t hear everyday.
Context is important, of course. Reading online in the comfort of home about how you’ll be knocked out and carved up is different in several important ways from listening to that same story told you by the person who is actually going to do the knocking and carving. But the context is always different, always more immediate in story telling as opposed to reading, even if the physical location is the same. People I love tell me stories on the phone while I sit in in this very chair, and it’s always far more affecting than if they’d told me the same story by way of a blog entry or email. There is something about voice, and intonation, and cadence, that can charge a story which would be flaccid in print.
And of course the physical presence of the story teller changes everything. It’s one thing to know someone is going to take a scalpel and slice you open, and another to have the actual hand that will grasp the scalpel pointing out things on a diagram with a pen, patting your forearm for reassuring emphasis. It’s one thing to read that someone is going to be peering onto your opened body, and another to hear the story told while you’re looking into the very eyes that will be doing the peering, eyes that truth be told turn out to be rather swoon-worthy regardless of context.
Again, it’s a truism, and yet one brought home to me rather powerfully yesterday, itself replete with story and meaning. Fraught.
I do like my surgeon. Not for any reason so shallow or annoying as her having pretty eyes which sort of thing never sways me ever. Rather, she seems to have understood the kind of person I am in rather short order. Or else she’s just a geek. Either’s good. In any event, after I admitted to her that I was about to pass out and she helped me get up onto the examining table so that I could lie down for a while, these were the words she chose with which to reassure me:
“It’s probably just vasovagal syncope. You should be fine in a few minutes.”
Vasovagal syncope is what happens to people who faint at the sight of blood, or upon hearing very bad (or very good) news, and there are a few other more corporeal causes. “Vasovagal” is a portmanteau word that means vasodepression (drop in blood pressure) associated with activity in the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve, one of twelve cranial nerves and a central part of the parasympathetic nervous system, runs from the brainstem down to the heart, lungs, and digestive system. It’s involved in regulation of heart rate, among other things, functioning in a manner roughly equivalent to that of a governor on an engine. When the vagus nerve signals, heart rate slows.
In vasovagal syncope, the vagus nerve is stimulated and the heart slows down, sometimes significantly. Meanwhile the parasympathetic nervous system responds to vagus nerve activity by relaxing the walls of blood vessels, making your blood pressure drop. The lower the blood pressure, the harder it is to pump enough blood up to the brain to keep it oxygenated — especially if the heart slows down significantly. The person thus affected first feels a prodrome of initial symptoms: dizziness, lightheadedness, breaking out in a cold sweat (sweat glands are stimulated by the vagus nerve), going pale, and other such familiar warning signs. You then pass out, which generally causes you to go more or less horizontal, making it easier for your heart to soothe your brain with oxygenated blood. You come to, feel horrible, try to stand up too soon and pass out again.
There are those who have tried to come up with evolutionary explanations for vasovagal syncope. Some of them mention the tonic immobility strategy, in otherwords, “playing possum” in response to perceived threat. The problem with this explanation is twofold: for one thing, opossums play possum deliberately, and the kinds of animals who eat them are far more likely to refuse prey that appears to be dead. We evolved in the presence of large predators perfectly willing to eat things they didn’t kill themselves. Secondly, direct threat to a person’s well-being isn’t a common trigger for vasovagal syncope. Strong emotion tends to be a more common trigger for vasovagal syncope, and strong emotion does not map perfectly with level of threat.
There probably is an evolutionary reason for vasovagal syncope, but as an unanticipated consequence of evolutionary strategy than as a directly adaptive trait. Simple logic and an overwhelming amount of anecdotal data suggests that vasovagal syncope is associated with upright posture. All other things being equal, fainting occurs when you’re standing or sitting upright, and passes when you lie down. But as J. Gert van Dijk points out in his paper “Fainting in animals” (Journal Clinical Autonomic Research Volume 13, Number 4 August, 2003), animals with a similar or greater gravitational differential between brain and heart aren’t susceptible to vasovagal syncope, which is why you never see nurses giving sips of apple juice to woozy giraffes or tree-climbing snakes. Though checking the latter’s blood pressure is an appealing image.
In all likelihood the thing that sets humans apart in this regard is not only our upright posture, but the relative greediness of our brains for oxygen. Our brains use lots of oxygen as a result of being big and top-heavy and complex and expensive in metabolic terms, a necessary condition and direct result both of our evolving the capability for higher reasoning, for conscious calculation, for speech.
It was storytelling that made me go faint yesterday, and that is true both in the immediate and evolutionary senses. The doctors call it “syncope,” “a cutting short,” as of blood flow and, by extension, consciousness. The Greeks had a cognate for it, synkope. It meant “contraction”: a word cut short.
Just reading this made me feel lightheaded.
But I’m like that sometimes. (more often lately)
Of course I reiterate all my phone empathies and wishes for easy, entirely less than conscious passage through, and quick, easy recovery.
And, to not miss a possible tangent in a very funny essay about the unfunny reasons for swoon:
An alphabet (a semiotic abstraction in which silent symbols represent sounds), type an abstract interpretation of handwriting, the more formal rules of grammar assumed in written language, and the non-synchronous nature of reading a story as opposed to listening to one all increase distance from the event.
Anne Carson, in high Classics geekery mode, riffs on the introduction of the written alphabet - and muses on the musings of a bunch of Classical writers in terms of how this changed us: how we think, how we experience and communicate story, how the alphabet mirrors love and desire, and other dirty smart bits.
She argues that it is IN this distancing and abstraction of which you speak that story (and love, and probably fainting too) resides. Eros the Bittersweet - a book of/on philosophy, Classics, longing, and writing. Not an easy book, but a good one.
Also?
… which is why you never see nurses giving sips of apple juice to woozy giraffes
Yes. But it’s a damn shame.
Swoon just thinking about it.
Why not consider the role evolution might have played to peoples’ responses to the presentation of information? Follow and pardon me while I oversimplify in ways that should make a trained evolutionary biologist/behavioralist/etc. cringe.
Evolutionary pressures would certainly select for people who took the spoken advice of their fellows seriously. Not long for this world was the knuckle-dragger who blithely dismissed reports of the detrimental effects of eating certain berries, the presence of carnivores by the water hole, or the addition of pointy sticks to the arsenal of the more-upright homids across the river. Heck, you could argue that evolution actively selects for credulity. Children who didn’t unthinkingly accept their parent’s orders and strictures were tomorrow’s saber tooth tiger poop. I think it was Richard Dawkins who took this argument to the extreme as a basis for uncritical religious belief.
Reading, as a later and more abstract development of language (the visual representation of a spoken word which is itself an abstraction of a state or thing) would, by default, be generally less impactful.
So, that all makes simplistic sense. But why the vasovagal syncope? Remember, not every physical trait has to be explained as a successful evolutionary adaptation—some things are side effects, some things linger on because they don’t kill us or get us killed. Maybe the vasovagal syncope is a relatively recent human syndrome, a consequence of our brains’ rapid cognitive development outpacing the rest of our species’ physiological development. Maybe we we can think of things far worse than what we’re physically evolved to handle.
Snarling, charging, slavering cave bear? Lots of options come to mind: grab a spear, pick up a rock, run faster than at least one other tribe member.
Listen to a surgeon describe what he or she is going to do to you in the name of better health? What options do you have? Neither fight nor flight, that’s for sure. Passing out starts to seem pretty reasonable to me.
Why not consider the role evolution might have played in the responses people have to the way in which information is presented? Follow and pardon me while I oversimplify in ways that should make a trained evolutionary biologist/behavioralist/etc. cringe.
Evolutionary pressures would certainly select for people who took the spoken advice of their fellows seriously. Not long for this world was the knuckle-dragger who blithely dismissed reports of the detrimental effects of eating certain berries, the presence of carnivores by the water hole, or the addition of pointy sticks to the arsenal of the more-upright homids across the river. Heck, you could argue that evolution actively selects for credulity. Children who didn’t unthinkingly accept their parent’s orders and strictures were tomorrow’s saber tooth tiger poop. I think it was Richard Dawkins who took this argument to the extreme as a basis for uncritical religious belief.
Reading, as a later and more abstract development of language (the visual representation of a spoken word which is itself an abstraction of a state or thing) would, by default, be generally less impactful.
So, that all makes simplistic sense. But why the vasovagal syncope? Remember, not every physical trait has to be explained as a successful evolutionary adaptation—some things are side effects, some things linger on because they don’t kill us or get us killed. Maybe the vasovagal syncope is a relatively recent human syndrome, a consequence of our brains’ rapid cognitive development outpacing the rest of our species’ physiological development. Maybe we we can think of things far worse than what we’re physically evolved to handle.
Snarling, charging, slavering cave bear? Lots of options come to mind: grab a spear, pick up a rock, run faster than at least one other tribe member.
Listen to a surgeon describe what he or she is going to do to you in the name of better health? What options do you have? Neither fight nor flight, that’s for sure. Passing out seems starts to seem pretty reasonable to me.
…it’s also generally accepted that writing found online is less profoundly moving than writing in print form
Printed words read online are physically inferior to the same words read off a typeset page in (at least) two significant ways. They are of lower resolution, thus harder to decode and the online delivery mechanism requires a certain posture and bearing to intercept the signal. Neither of these factors is terribly significant, not enough to cause me to forgo reading Syncopation online within hours of when it was written; to instead wait for the typeset version that would be delivered at considerable relative expense sometime next month.
IMHO, the key factor in our experience of these different media is Attention. Most edited, typeset, printed messages offer limited distraction while we decode and assimilate their message package. On the web distraction is epidemic. CRN is a very quiet web place, well laid out to enhance the printed word and limit distraction. Exception.
Telephone conversation requires a surprising amount of concentration for both speaker and auditor. Talking on a cell while driving lowers the driver’s road skills to that of a legal drunk. That driver is not impaired, just attentive to non-driving activity. Anyone who’s ever engaged in technical phone support knows that extracting and transmitting specific information with relative strangers over a voice-only circuit is very demanding and very frustrating.
In-person conversation in a quiet setting like a doctor’s office is a high band-width human communications channel. Online is more like discussing literature in a sports bar on game night.
First - sympathies! I don’t want you to have to go through ANything icky or scary. So I’m really sorry you’re in that place. Having been there, I can tell you you’ll be fine, and that it’s great material for future writing projects - but I’d much rather you didn’t have to even think about it. The post, though, was pretty fascinating. I’ve had that reaction once or twice; J. is more likely to than I am, in spite of being very good in a crisis. I came extremely close to passing out while watching a lab rat being operated on once; mostly I was surprised, and then embarrassed.
Will be thinking of you.
Best wishes!
Chris, hope everything goes well.
As I tell anyone I know slated for surgery or medical procedure, this is the best of all possible times to be alive.
For the edification of your fans (and, possibly, the delight of your enemies), I’m imagining a surgical adventure video on YouTube titled ... wait for it ...
“Inside Chris Clarke.”
Illegal use of the phrase “gravitational differential”! ten yard penalty!
Likely what he meant to say was “pressure differential”, due to the gravitational differential between sea level and a few miles up being almost immeasurable, which is why orbits are neccesary.
However the pressure difference between the first and third floors of a building is such that it is impossible to drink from a can of coke at street level via a three story tall straw. At least, impossible without either causing your lungs to explode, turn inside out or would end up with the entire contents of hte can being squirted through the back of your throat in a high pressure jet.
This is one of the many reasons why they don’t make straws larger than two stories tall.
It’s still not huge of course, but combined with vascular contractions and similar stuff, the pressure difference between head and heart can be quite significant, especially considering that the human blood supply is in an enclosed volume, and so suckage at the top produces a counteracting psuedoforce in the opposite direction towards the feet.
which is why whenever you decapitate a person with a big head and then prop their body upright against a wall or something their feet tend to swell somewhat.
Friendly amendment accepted, R. I was trying to avoid saying something clunky like “animals with a similar or greater cerebro-cardiac potential energy ratio.”
More evidence of my own cerebral suckage, I’m afraid.
Hey you’re the one who’s convinced pretty surgeons to stick things inside you, so don’t go knocking the clarke!brain just yet.
nitpicking cat just…
nitpicks.
Nyoar~r
So there I was, in a dimly lit room. A lithe, cute blonde woman applied warm oil to my skin and commenced to stroke me with a broad, circular motion, an ever-decreasing spiral centered on my—- gall bladder.
Sonomgrams for gallstones are far more interesting in the telling than in the sonogramming.
I passed out when told, should I have had gallstones, how they would have been dealt with. I passed out when I got shots for my three-week trip to Chiapas to climb Maya ruins. I passed out when the doctor told me how he was going to use a laser to remove the plantar wart on my foot. I passed out when the dentist told me about my root canal. I pass out every time I give blood. I passed out when I first had contacts put on my eyes.
Chris, let me know if you need advice on how to deal with the ol’ vasovagal syncope. I’m something of a cold sweat expert.
Good luck!
I think it depends on the kind of writing. Expository writing, which explains everything but doesn’t enable us to connect to the emotional reality of something, is distancing. But narrative is gripping.
(PS—and I should have said this first!—good luck with your surgery. I’ll be holding you in my thoughts.)
hank fox, you devil! i kind of doubt we’ll be getting the visuals on the “inside chris clarke” tour. even though he has a swoopy phone with a camera and everything.
chris, hope it goes well. best for a swift and painless recovery.
At last report, upended possums are not, in fact, “playing possum”. I.e., according to physiologic measurements, they really have collapsed in terror.
Good luck with whatever it is that they are going to do inside you. I suspect that it will be less disturbing than hearing about it, weird as that sounds.
I think that a large part of the message that gets left out when you shift from person to text is the embodied information that accompanies the words - tone of voice, body posture, facial expressions, look of the eyes, and so on. And these are the sort of things we’re programmed to respond to, often at an unconscious visceral level. So, echoing black dog barking’s comment, online text is a lo-fi signal compared to the surround-sound, hi-def, shaking chair quality of an inperson conversation.
I’ve never fainted, but it’s definitely a combination of blood pressure and anxiety that makes me come close (the worst - having blood drawn after fasting - I always bring a container of milk to bolt down before lying prone for the next 15 minutes after they are done). Not fun. I suspect it’s not unrelated to panic attacks; a lot of the same sort of things trigger those in me, and I know it’s not just physical, nor purely mental, but a bit of both.
Low blood pressure and an over-sensitive vagus response = not much fun.
On a mildly related note, have you read Caleb Crain’s case for logocentrism (so to <strike>speak</strike> write)?