Communication Does it Need You?
What is communication, really? What initiates it? And why?
A note before we begin:
This piece started, as most things do, with someone else’s words landing in mine.
A recent article — The Neuroanatomy of Language: How the Brain Builds Words, Meaning, and Communication by Dr. David Traster — didn’t so much inspire this as finally kick loose something I’ve been carrying since university, when I chose to do a thesis on communication. A huge subject, I know. A question I kept circling and never quite sat down with.
What is communication, really? What initiates it? And why?
Dr. Traster maps the neuroscience with remarkable clarity — the architecture, the hemispheres, the plasticity. I recommend reading it. What follows is something different. Less map, more wandering. The questions his science made me finally stop ignoring.
Consider this the rabbit hole his article opened.
And to a point — yes, I think the subject is too big. Do I think it needs to be asked? Also yes. Can I see anyone else asking it quite this way? I can’t. So here we are.
Room 1 — What is communication, really?
Communication. We say the word like we understand it. Like it’s settled. A thing that happens between mouths and ears, between fingers and screens, between one mind and another. Boxes of meaning, exchanged. Bits and bobs in different languages, dressed up in different sounds.
But what if that’s exactly backwards?
What if communication isn’t something we do — but something that does us? What if language isn’t the vessel we pour our thoughts into, but the architecture our thoughts are built inside of in the first place? You didn’t choose your first language any more than you chose your first heartbeat. It was brought to you. It wired you. And somewhere in the soft tissue of your developing brain, it started constructing the version of you that would one day believe it was simply using words.
That’s not a metaphor. That’s neuroscience. And it’s also, maybe, the most quietly unsettling thing about being human.
Room 2 — Does communication require a mind?
Consider a satellite. Right now, somewhere above the curvature of this planet, a signal is travelling. It left a transmitter, it will find a receiver, and something will be communicated — your location, a timestamp, a correction to a trajectory. No one intended that specific exchange. No one felt it. No consciousness leaned into it the way you lean into a conversation.
And yet. The pattern was sent. The pattern was received. The meaning — if we can even call it that — arrived intact.
So was that communication? Or just... physics?
Maybe the uncomfortable answer is: there’s no difference. Maybe what we call communication is just pattern transfer, and the part where a human sits in the middle — feeling, intending, reaching toward another mind — is not the definition of communication. It’s just one version of it. A particularly loud version. One that convinced itself it invented the whole thing.
Room 3 — Does it require us at all?
On the 15th of August, 1977, a radio telescope in Ohio caught something. A signal. Narrowband, powerful, arriving from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. It lasted 72 seconds. It bore the hallmarks of everything we’d been told to look for — the kind of structured, non-random pattern that shouldn’t exist in the noise of deep space without intention behind it.
A researcher named Jerry Ehman looked at the printout. And in the margin, in red pen, he wrote one word.
Wow.
It was never heard again.
We don’t know what sent it. We don’t know if anything sent it — in the way we mean when we use that word. No mind has ever been confirmed on the other end. No meaning has ever been decoded. And yet something happened in Jerry Ehman’s brain the moment he saw that sequence — something ancient and automatic and completely beyond his choosing. A recognition. A reaching. The same thing that happens in an infant’s brain when it first hears its mother’s voice and begins, without instruction, to map the pattern.
Something is being said.
But here’s the question that keeps the lights on at night: what if nothing was? What if the signal was just physics — pressure and frequency and the indifferent geometry of the universe doing what physics does? What if the communication — the meaning — didn’t travel across space at all, but was manufactured entirely on Earth, in the soft wet tissue of one human mind, desperate as all human minds are to find a pattern, to find a signal, to find proof that the universe is speaking?
What if we are not the receivers of communication — but the inventors of it?
What if meaning doesn’t exist in the signal.
Only in the listener.
Room 4 — So what are we, inside it?
Before you had a single word, you had a world.
Not a described world. Not a named world. But a world of warmth and cold, of rhythm and rupture, of a heartbeat you’d been listening to from inside for months before you ever took a breath. You knew the cadence of a specific voice before you knew what a voice was. You reached toward faces before you had a word for face, or reaching, or you.
You were thinking. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. And if they do — ask them exactly when thinking begins. At what precise moment. In what measurable instant does a mind switch from not-thinking to thinking. Watch them hesitate. Watch them reach for a definition that keeps moving the closer they get to it.
Exactly.
It wasn’t the kind of thinking you can report or defend or write a thesis on. It was older than that. Sensation folding into pattern. Pattern folding into expectation. Expectation — that electric lean toward what comes next — is perhaps the most fundamental form of thought there is. And you were doing it before language arrived to give it a name.
So what happened when language came?
It didn’t create your mind. It formatted it. Like a coordinate system dropped over a landscape that already existed — suddenly everything had a position, a relationship, a way of being pointed at and shared. The wordless weight of hunger became I’m hungry. The animal recognition of a familiar face became mother. The shapeless reaching became I want, I need, I love.
But here’s what got lost in the translation.
The thing you felt before the word arrived — that pure, pre-linguistic pulse of experience — language can point toward it but never quite reach it. Every word is an approximation. A lossy compression of something that existed, whole and unedited, before the formatting began.
You’ve been trying to close that gap ever since.
Every poem ever written. Every piece of music. Every moment someone said I can’t explain it and meant it completely — that’s the echo of a mind that knew something before it knew how to say it. That’s the baby in the crib, receiving everything, able to transmit almost nothing.
And maybe — just maybe — that’s what the WOW signal was too.
Something that knew. Something that felt the universe in a way we don’t have coordinates for yet. A transmission from a mind — or something like a mind — that experienced something so vast it could only compress it into 72 seconds of radio frequency and send it outward, into the dark, hoping something on the other end was built to feel what couldn’t be said.
We’re all sending signals into rooms we’re not sure are occupied.
We’re all waiting to see if something writes Wow in the margin.
The lossy compression idea is really good. Every word an approximation of something that existed whole before the formatting began. I’ve been thinking about these ideas as well. They remind me of the phenomenology of psychology class I took in college.
Where I find myself is one step sideways from your Room 3. Not disagreeing — more like I ended up in an adjacent room and the view is slightly different from here.
The Wow signal had structure. That structure existed before Jerry Ehman’s red pen. The “Wow”, that’s his. That’s meaning, observer-made, real in its own right. But the 72 seconds of organized frequency? That was already a record. Already a deformation in the fabric of what happened. Whether anyone ever looked or not.
So I don’t think meaning lives in the signal. I’m with you there. I think the signal was real independent of the listener. Which doesn’t diminish what you’re saying it might actually make it stranger and more interesting. Because if the universe is already full of structure, already dense with records that exist whether or not anyone shows up to read them, then what consciousness does isn’t manufacture meaning from nothing. It meets something real and makes something new with it.
The baby in the crib isn’t inventing the world. But it isn’t just receiving it either. The heartbeat, the light, the temperature, that’s all just noise until something looks back. Until there’s a face that responds, that changes, that is unmistakably Mother. And in that collision — not in the sensation, but in the encounter — something starts. Not a toggle. A curve. The slow crystallization of a mind that didn’t exist before that relationship began.
Which means consciousness doesn’t bootstrap from input. It bootstraps from meeting.
And if that’s true, the record has to be real. You can’t have a genuine encounter with something you invented. The mother has to actually be there for the kickstart to happen. The otherness is the whole point.
Maybe that’s what makes the Wow signal so haunting. Not that we might have manufactured the meaning — but that something real was there to meet. Structure that existed independent of Jerry Ehman’s red pen. And for 72 seconds, across unimaginable distance, something that might have been a mind encountered something that definitely was one.