How important is body language when communicating with someone?

Super important. But the more you know someone, the better you’ll interpret their body language.

Very important…

I used to work with a guy from another country. He would vigorously shake his head back and forth when he said, “Yes”. He had American body language backwards. It took some getting used.

Research shows that 55% of communication is conveyed by the body language we use. Taken from here.

Be self aware while interacting with others?

Are you moving your limbs to strengthen what you’re saying, or are you not even aware of how your body reacts?

I’m usually only aware of my own when I’m under the magnifying glass like a job interview, etc.

It is one of the things that intrigues me most though, and so I have studied it a great deal. I do rather enjoy sitting at a window in a restaurant or café and watching passersby. If you pay attention, body language will communicate what the person is unable/unwilling to articulate. A pretty huge clue into what they’re truly thinking/feeling if you ask me.

So important.

My boyfriend can read me better than I can read myself. He knows if I like someone new we met, if I’m anxious to leave, etc before I do a lot of times just from my body language.

Open book @nikipedia – I am that way with my Wife! Does he have Sisters?

Very. I haven’t been able to read these signals, and so I have studied body language extensively. I do OK now, but still miss many ideas conveyed in conversation because I don’t intuitively understand the unspoken parts.

Very important.

Yes, yes, yes and yes! BL is a very telling and important way of communicating especially in reading the intent and true motive/feelings of who you are in front of. When I first started at this job a long time ago the boss would mention my tells and cues and that he always said he knew what I was really thinking. He was right. I learned from him and my own research and it has been the most valuable interpersonal skill I ever developed. It’s like reading someones mind!!

Very important. That’s one of the reasons sometimes things get confused or misunderstood when chatting online like this. There’s just something missing when all you see is written words.

Body language is a critical key to decoding the emotional content of the spoken words.
Only the keen and experienced observer has the best chance of understanding the speaker’s intended meaning and their motivation.

@Dr_Lawrence I like the way you characterized your answer!

I used to think it was critical to understand normative body language until I met my girlfriend, who doesn’t really understand gestures, since she has never seen them. Then I realized, that while we didn’t begin by speaking the same body language, we slowly developed our own, just as satisfying, revealing and communicative.

@Cruiser – Thank you for the feedback!

I think that I can tell what a person is thinking underneath their fake smile by their body language.

Body language is important. Understanding it is not the big deal some people make it out to be. We all have the skills and knowledge to understand it. It’s just that mostly we are not aware of what we are doing. That’s because “language” is a misleading term. It’s more like body communication than language. Language is a nice metaphor, but it can be misleading if we forget it is only a metaphor.

We are used to language have words. Discrete little units of meaning. Body communication doesn’t work that way. You can’t translate it into words. It’s a fools errand to try.

I believe we have many kinds of minds in our brains. I think it makes sense to group them into two categories for ease of thinking. I think we have a linguistic mind and a non-linguistic mind. These two minds communicate in odd ways. They don’t speak the same “language.” The non-linguistic mind knows things in a more holistic way. It doesn’t parse things. It mostly observes and thinks, but since we only understand things in words, and it doesn’t use words, it has a hell of a time becoming apparent to us.

Often it isn’t apparent. We experience sudden insights as if they come from nowhere. Uh uh. They come from the non-linguistic mind which works in a different way.

Meditation is one good way to find out what’s going on in the non-linguistic mind. It stills the linguistic chatter, and if you do it well enough, you can actually start to pay attention to the non-linguistic mind. You start to get a different perspective on the world and on life—the perspective this other mind has. Dance and music are other ways to still the linguistic mind. Dance is really good for the subject we are talking about, because it is all about body language. It’s the way I use to access the non-linguistic mind most often.

So that mind is always working. It understands things that “speak” the way it speaks. It has a hard time with words, and it has a hard time transferring knowledge to the linguistic mind (sometimes thought of as the “thinking” mind, since that’s usually all that most of us believe we experience as thought).

But this difficulty in translation doesn’t really matter. The non-linguistic mind is always doing its work, and that’s why we understand body language “instinctively.” It conveys the information we need to know. The linguistic mind often experiences it as an intuition or a “eureka” moment. The non-linguistic mind is usually to blame when we find we know something without knowing how we know it.

Body language is important. As others have said, it conveys a lot of information. It’s just that we are often not consciously aware of that information because we think it has to come in words; that it has to be a “language.” Much information is communicated in ways other than language and words. We get it despite whether we are aware of it or not.

This means that there is a lot missing online. We only have words with each other and we miss out on so much or what is meant. It’s really sad in a way; especially if people get addicted to the internet and don’t have much real contact with people. On the other had, the internet helps us find others like us. That is valuable, especially for shy people, or people for whom it can be dangerous to be out in public—people with mental illnesses, for example.

My final answer? I can’t begin to “tell” you how important body language is in communicating with others. I could dance it, though.

@daloon Unless one is living with Aspergers Syndrome. Then understanding this non linguistic communication is not, at all, instinctive. But I would still pay to see you dance it!

I think it is extremely important. If you know how to read it properly, you will know if they are speaking the truth or not, or how they are feeling—even if they talk like everything’s fine.

It can help a lot in most cases, and the lack of body language on the internet often leads to misunderstanding. Facial expressions and tone of voice are very important.

Extremely important. A whole section of our brain is devoted to interpreting faces.

@Jewel I wrote all that and you still don’t get it? I think I’m going out to drink.

@daloon Will you be dancing? ;-)
No, I didn’t see any allowanace in your answer for those of us who struggle to fake understanding of non-verbal communication. We may learn some ways to identify a certain facial expression as irritation, but still not ‘feel’ it. Our response to this flat information is also learned. It isn’t a response to the irritation of the other person, as much as it is a practiced response to maintain the facade of normalcy. We still don’t “Get it”. We just struggle to understand and generally find other things to occupy us that don’t involve social situations .
Great answer though! Just missing that one teeny part about the ones who don’t ever understand it…even if it is danced.

It seems like some of you are saying that because by girlfriend can’t gaze into my eyes, or see my posture, or any other visual cues, that means she is incapable of understanding me, and yet she seems to know when there is something wrong before I do. How does that happen?

@pdworkin If she has Aspergers, she isn’t devoid of emotion, or the ability to find ways to understand you. She just has to use different faculties. Same goes for physical blindness. She may be even more in touch with who you are because of this. I wish you much love!

She doesn’t have Asperger’s. She’s congenitally blind. So how do you think that works?

@pdworkin I edited my response to include physical blindness. We are amazing in the ways we can use the faculties we have to supliment, or replace those we lack. Blindness is famous for this. All other senses become more acute to make up for the loss of sight. This would surely include any extra sensory abilities.

So the people who have been saying that facial expressions are important are wrong?

@pdworkin Not at all. They are important. IF you can see them or understand them. If you can’t, then you use what information you can acquire. Voice inflection, smell, what shoes they are wearing, the ability to study a situation and find a sensible conclusion in it, everything except visual indicators. There are many.

@Jewel I hate to go the black box route, but hell, this is all theory anyway. We need some scientific investigation to go any further on my theory.

You are thinking as if body language is like language. You are thinking as if your linguistic mind can understand body language.

It’s not like that. Your conscious mind does not have easy access to what the non-linguistic mind is “thinking.” It may not have any access in some people. Yet the non-linguistic mind is still working and thinking—you just aren’t aware of it.

Now I seriously doubt that people with Aspergers have minds that do not include a non-linguistic component. I suspect you are like the rest of us in being unaware of what is going on. Your body knows. You don’t know. You don’t know what your body knows. You’re operating under the illusion that you can know what your body knows, as if it were a translation from Russian, or something. It doesn’t work that way.

You say you struggle to fake understanding of body language. Well, so do people without Aspergers. You way over-estimate what you are missing. We have almost as little clue as you do. You have socialization problems—but those are not the cues I’m talking about. Yes, people can show annoyance or impatience. Those things are easy (for us). That’s not what I’m talking about. That kind of body language can be translated. But it’s just another expression of emotion.

What I’m talking about is different. It’s deeper and more complex, and I don’t know if you get it or not, but I know it happens inside you, and that it finds ways to communicate to you, as well. I just know this. I could be wrong, of course, we’ll see some day. In any case, it’s all theory.

But yeah, dancing is a way out. The kind of dancing I do is purely about expressing what you need to in the moment. If you don’t want to or can’t relate to anyone else at the time, you can still move. It would be interesting to experiment, but I think it’s actually a form of social dancing that a person with Aspergers could feel comfortable in, once they learned what was going on. But that’s all I can say about that. The rest is private.

I do dance, and when I do, I feel like I have a strong impact on others because my energy is so intense and focussed. I just get out of my head and into my body and I stay there—focusing on the story I am living, and not trying to think into the future or remember the past. I’m just there, doing what I find I need to do in that moment. Sometimes—maybe even often—I’m all alone on the floor when everyone else is connecting to someone else. I don’t mind. I know that if I stay with my true feelings and movements, it will fit in. It may even attract others.

I wish I could know that in my linguistic mind life. When I dance, I know everything that is important. At all other times, I am pretty much lost. When I play music, it is often like that, too, although it is not quite as reliable as dance is. I am really fucking tired of living my planful life. I want to live a real life. But I don’t think that’s going to happen, unless my non-linguistic mind has a really good idea of how to make that happen.

“Now I seriously doubt that people with Aspergers have minds that do not include a non-linguistic component.”
Try being an Aspie and you might find out differently. We can learn it… slowly. However, we can never do it nearly as well as a person who learns it intuitively, especially since most people start learning such things when they are small children while Aspies may learn slower on their own, or possibly NEVER learn even with dedicated instruction.
It’s one thing to be confused by signs, it’s another to not even notice them.

@jerv Thank you. That says it very clearly.
@daloon, I would love to watch you dance! It sounds like you connect directly with the life force in you.
I wish I could explain what Aspergers is in a better way. I understand what you are saying, and I also know you don’t understand what aspergers is. An aspie may have a non linguistic brain, but we are not connected to it in any real way. We may learn to understand what things are, but we don’t understand them intuitively. Some have an easier time of it than others, but it isn’t part of who we are. It is so difficult that we tend to be loners. Socializing is like a minefield. The things that people do in social situations don’t make sense to me. I am 56 and have had a lifetime to learn how to read and understand how to be social. I can manage very well in some uncomplicated situations, but there are things that I will never ‘get’. I hope I did a better job of explaining. I will not bother you again with it. There are others on fluther who understand it better and have a better grasp of the language and a better ability to explain things. Perhaps one of them will be able to make this more understandable. (Ah, jerv to the rescue!)
I envy your ability to find connection through physical movement. Aspies also tend to be clutzes!

As for other non-linguistic components of the mind, pick up a copy of Thinking in Pictures by Dr Temple Grandin. We can think quite well, especially without the impediment of words, but communication…. not one of our strong suits. That tends to lead to a lot of frustration as well, but that is another issue.

There are degrees and I am lucky that I had enough help in my younger days to help me mitigate my major issues. I used to be a little bit of a klutz, but a little extra phys-ed when I was young helped me a bit with the hand-eye coordination, and some of my hobbies like bike-riding (for balance) and building model cars (fine motor control) also helped. A little speech therapy, some social-adaptive tutoring, and my ability to learn quickly let me either overcome or cover up most of my other shortcomings.

As for others like Jewel…. I would only be able to guess… and probably not very well.

Thinking in pictures? That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about! It’s holistic. I don’t think you could think in pictures if you didn’t have a good non-linguistic mind. The whole point is that there are no words. You keep on insisting on putting words in my mouth, but I’m spitting them out. I am positive you guys get it. You just don’t know you get it—probably because I’m trying to explain it in words. Words just don’t do it. Words are totally a different world from what I’m talking about, and judging from what you say, you are quite comfortable in this world.

As to dancing—perhaps that’s the wrong word. It’s a movement workshop, and it really doesn’t matter how you move. The whole point is to remove judgment from it entirely. And generally it works to get people out of their judgmental minds.

How you move is irrelevant. That you move is what is important. And believe me, you lose your mind and gain something else. It’s a very different thing and it is wonderful. You might get some of it if you watched, but it isn’t something to watch. It’s only to play. It’s a group experience, and you may be loners but you’d have to see it to understand. It is the kind of thing that incorporates loners quite well.

Well, we’ll never know.

@daloon Been there. Done that. It doesn’t interest me. So, we do know.

@daloon There is a little more to it. I think that you are in a different world while Jewel and I are in our own little pocket dimensions but I think your little world is a close neighbor. Considering how my neighbors here in meatspace speak a different language from me (Ethiopian) that analogy actually holds a bit more literal truth to it than it normally would.

Oh, and to clear one other thing up, we are not all loners. Some of us are quite sociable (if occasionally awkward, like a stereotypical nerd), and others are conditionally so. only feeling truly comfortable in a group of people we have something in common with. For instance, I am a gamer and while most people would look at me funny for going on at great length about how a Goblin Mob compares to a White Weenie deck, they get it. Same goes for cars and computers; I can (and sometimes do) go on and on and on and on about the awesomness of the ATTESA-Pro AWD system or being able to run a system that has a high enough bus speed to get away with a CPU multiplier in the low-single-digit range as opposed to the x17 multiplier on my old P4 Northwood….

I suppose there are dance g33ks too though so there is some commonality between us :)

@jerv & @daloon
True, what jerv said. I shouldn’t have generalized. Sorry. My experiences have been pretty typical so I ran with it. I just wanted daloon to understand. I still don’t think he does, but it really doesn’t matter, does it? Hope I didn’t over-do. Again.

I’m sorry. I think I’m too invested in being different,

@daloon I’m not exactly invested in being different. I’m just living off of an abnormality trust fund ;)

@jerv No. I said I was the one invested in being different.

@daloon I know; I was just citing a difference between you and I :)

Now who can’t tell when there’s humor going on? Huh?

@daloon Never let it be said that Aspies are humorless. It’s merely a different type of humour.

I never said that aspies were humorless. My cousin is one, so it runs in my family, apparently. As does bipolar disorder. Lucky us! He once wrote me to ask if there were any symptoms on my side of the family. I couldn’t think of any. But now, perhaps I am a twee bit humor-impaired (not just you, but all over the place). Just being silly.

I’d be curious to know how much of our body language is unintentional and how much we can control. Does anyone actually make a concerted effort to USE body language? I’m thinking about making eye contact, flirting, etc. Some people have to be trained to use body language effectively. I was looking at this site: http://www.simplybodylanguage.com and it seems to me that they are saying you can control body language – at least to an extent. I always thought you just acted a certain way because you were programmed like that from birth. Any other ideas?