Salience Mismatch

Discussion

James Gien Wong:

" In Indyweb, the terminology "Salience mismatch" emerged to describe the ubiquitous learning situation which can be described from a neuroscientific and phenomenological perspective:

- 1. The context is a group meeting. Some relevant Deep Humanity / Indyweb terminology that applies here:

       - meaningverse - the universe of meaning that an individual aggregates over a lifetime of living within a culture
       - multi-meaningverse - the universe of meaning that is the sum total of all the meaningverses whenever a group convenes and socially interacts 
       - salience landscape (Vervaeke) - the set of ideas that are salient to the individual at that time of his/her life
   

- 2. In any meeting, a multi-meaningverse is present.

- 3. In any meeting, conversation takes place.

- 4. Conversation is a flow of idea exchange in which each participant alternately speaks & listens

- 5. This can be described in information system terms as:

       - each person takes a turn:
           - broadcasting a message
           - receiving messages broadcasted by others
   

- 6. Broadcasting requires realtime encoding of ideas into a common language code

- 7. Each word chosen in reatime to present the idea has a particular and unique meaning in the broadcaster's meaningverse

- 8 That unique meaning is called "semantic fingerprint" by

       - Cortical.io 
           - https://www.cortical.io/
       - but Gyuri and I rename it to "synammethesetic fingerprint" in honor of Nora Bateson's terminology of symmathesy
           - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnorabateson.wordpress.com%2F2015%2F11%2F03%2Fsymmathesy-a-word-in-progress%2F&group=__world__
       - because meaning is not a fixed object (conveyed by the word "semantic")
       - but is a dynamic, alive, moving cultural process (better conveyed by Nora's word "symmathesy" - mutual learning)
   

- 9. The speaker / broadcaster encodes the words (s)he chooses to articuate and present the ideas that have his/her own unique symmathesetic fingerprint

- 10. When the broadcast message acoustic signal reaches each receiver's ears, it is decoded and translated into neural firing patterns that reach the brain and enter the receiver's consciousness

- 11. The broadcasted message words interact with each receiver's associative network of ideas and triggers their own respective and UNIQUE symmathesetic fingerprint associated with the word

- 12. Hence, the broadcasted message is NOT exactly the same as the received message, due to the unique meaningverse and associated symmathesetic fingerprint of the words of the receiver's meaningverse

- 13. This can give rise to misinterpretation or salience mismatch

- 14. salience mismatch is the receiver's experience when the salience of the conveyed message is not experienced by the receiver:

       - there is a mismatch between the salience of the speaker / transmitter / broadcaster and the listener / receiver.
   

- 15. When the speaker / transmitter additionally communicates a diversity of ideas from his/her associative network of ideas clustered around the main idea to the listener / receiver, it helps to provide more of the speaker / transmitter's symmathesetic fingerprint for the words / ideas for which a listener / receiver originally experienced a salience mismatch.

- 16. When the salience mismatch is resolved, then we can describe the ideas as now "making sense"

- 17. The Indyweb's timebinding associative networking encodes the symmathesetic fingerprint of words / ideas so that if we choose to make that accessible to a receiver, they can more fully grasp meaning, mitigating salience mismatch and misinterpretation.

- 18. Feedback of salience mismatch plays a key role for the speaker / transmitter to improve articulation /communication skills. When feedback is provided of salience mismatch, it challenges the speaker / transmitter to articulate more clearly, and emerge aspects of the symmathesetic fingerprint that may have remained hidden to the listener / receiver."

(Telegram, January 2025)