The Reconstruction of Meaning

When we speak, we operate with a silent assumption. We place meaning inside words, send them out, and assume the other person will open the box and find the same thing inside. The belief that “I said it, therefore it was conveyed” is reassuring, but it does not always reflect reality. Once a sentence leaves our mouth and reaches the other person’s ear, it is no longer our sentence. There, it is constructed anew. Communication is not a transfer but a process of reconstruction, and in fact, this is what makes relationship itself possible.

To see where this reconstruction begins, it can be useful to trace the path of speech before it even reaches the brain.

The outer ear collects sound waves and causes the eardrum to vibrate. These vibrations are amplified by the three tiny bones of the middle ear and transmitted to the fluid-filled cochlea in the inner ear. Thousands of hair cells inside the cochlea convert this mechanical movement into electrical nerve impulses.

This detail matters. Sound is converted into electrical signals not in the brain, but in the ear. The auditory nerve does not carry sound itself to the brain. It carries a translation of sound. In other words, speech has already changed form once before it even becomes an object of thought. And the organ performing this translation does not work with exactly the same sensitivity in everyone.

The brain is a vast network of roughly 86 billion interconnected neurons, and the map of this network is as individual as a fingerprint. Experience is one of the important forces that shape this network throughout life.

Learning proceeds alongside changes in which synaptic connections strengthen or weaken, new connections form, and existing ones are reorganized. Since no two people can have exactly the same history of experience, their networks cannot be exactly the same either.

The sensory information carried by an incoming signal does not, by itself, determine what a sentence will mean to us. It combines with everything the network has accumulated up to that point, with who has used a particular word before, with what a certain tone of voice recalls, and becomes “meaning.”

The same words do not have to produce completely identical neural and associative patterns in two different people.

The image that appears in the other person’s mind is not a copy of mine. It is another image, made from their own material.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this.

The first is this: if no exact copy is produced, then we should develop methods to reduce the loss. Speak more clearly, verify, ask for feedback. Useful, but ultimately a superficial response.

The second conclusion is more interesting. According to Emmanuel Levinas, one of the deeply rooted habits of our intellectual tradition is to understand the other by placing them inside our own concepts. To understand is to grasp, and to grasp is to seize. In this form of understanding, the person before me is reduced to my idea of them. They effectively disappear, replaced by the copy I have made of them. From a Levinasian perspective, this kind of reduction can become a form of violence. The person before me exceeds every image I can construct of them.

Neuroscience shows that another person’s meaning is not copied directly into my mind. Levinas does not treat this as a lack of knowledge. For him, alterity comes before knowing.

My brain inevitably reconstructs the other person’s words within its own history and connections. The problem is not reconstruction itself. The problem begins when I mistake the meaning I have constructed for the person themselves. Levinas’s ethics reminds us, precisely here, that the Other can never be fully contained within my understanding.

At that point, the impossibility of perfect copying stops being a defect. If I could transfer the meaning in another person’s mind into my own mind exactly, that person would cease to be other to me and would become an extension of myself. That I can never fully exhaust them is not a flaw in the relationship but one of its conditions.

The fact that the person before me can never reveal themselves to me completely does not mean that I cannot understand them. It means that my understanding can never amount to the whole of who they are.

Levinas makes a distinction between the Said and the Saying. The Said is the content of the sentence. It can be recorded, quoted, and transmitted.

The Saying, by contrast, is my opening myself to the other in the act of speaking, exposing myself to them, making myself available to be addressed and to respond. It comes before content and cannot be fully contained within it.

The screen keeps the Said relatively stable, but removes many of the sensory cues that accompany the Saying.

When we speak face to face, we do not receive only the other person’s words. We also perceive tone, emphasis, pauses, and the face. In writing, many of these layers fall away, leaving the bare words behind. But the brain does not like gaps. It feels compelled to fill them, and the only material it has is its own. When we cannot hear the other person’s voice, the brain generates that voice itself. A message that seems perfectly ordinary when we are cheerful can feel cutting or hostile, in exactly the same words, when we are anxious.

The writer’s choice of words, punctuation, the history of the relationship, the context, and the reader’s expectations all shape the tone together. The reader’s state of mind also plays a powerful role in how that tone is constructed.

The strange part is that we often fail to notice this while writing. We hear our own sentence in our head with the correct tone already attached. We know it is a joke. We know it is not meant as reproach. And that inner voice is so vivid that we assume the other person will somehow hear it too. What we actually send, however, is a text stripped of that inner voice.

“That’s not what I meant” is one of the most frequently repeated sentences in written communication.

To compensate for what is missing, we have developed a kind of prosthetic language. Punctuation, emojis, capital letters, stretched-out words. “Okay.” and “okayyy” are two different messages, and the difference is carried not by the dictionary but by shared habits. Yet those habits vary across generations. A period that one person reads as polite may strike another as the linguistic equivalent of slamming a door.

Writing gives thought time. A sentence can be withdrawn, revised, and rebuilt. The reader can proceed at their own pace and return to an earlier passage. Writing also leaves a record. Both sides can later look back at what was actually said, and misunderstandings can be corrected. Since much of our relationships, work, and disagreement now takes place through writing, the answer cannot simply be to avoid written communication.

Because the screen removes many of the cues available in face-to-face communication, it does not reduce responsibility. On the contrary, it increases it.

There are now fewer signs capable of correcting the picture I have constructed for myself. When a message unsettles me, the first question should be whether that tone is really in the text or in my own mind.

Hearing is physiological and largely involuntary. A healthy ear continually perceives its surroundings without requiring us to do anything. Listening, however, is hearing plus attention and intention.

Listening means resisting a natural tendency of the brain. Asking questions, checking our interpretation, reading body language, and remaining aware of its absence on a screen are not merely communication skills. They are forms of this resistance. That is why listening is tiring.

And the question is not, “Did the other person understand me?”

The question is: Was I able to let them remain someone other than me, without making them resemble the image I had constructed of them?