One of my best friends from high school lives in San Diego. I had a family reunion over the weekend in San Clemente, so after spending some time there, I drove the hour down the coast to San Diego and stayed with her for a few days. She works a few nights a week at a downtown bar and restaurant off of Ocean Beach called OB Noodle House and Sake Bar. It has a neat environment and feel to it, and is a very comfortable and modern place to meet a friend, grab some food and have a beer.
I went in and met some friends there for dinner and drinks one night, and while I was there, I found myself observing people at the bar. I kept rolling the idea around in my head and became more and more intrigued with observing the changes in nonverbal communication as people became intoxicated.
I watched a few people come and go, but none of them stayed long enough to really form any opinions. It was usually just a beer with dinner, and then out the door.
Luckily for me, at about the time I was preparing to abandon my study, another old friend came to meet us. He was really the only person there drinking heavily and consistently, and he probably had a few before he came. Initially, I was disappointed. I had hoped to observe a complete stranger, thinking that I was less likely to have existing opinions and eliminate bias with someone I had never met, but I quickly realized that having the "observee" in my immediate party posed an advantage. I was familiar with his sober behavior and could more readily observe his drifts from norm as he became inebriated.
As he became more and more drunk, I was surprised by what I saw. His behavior and the types of nonverbal communication he displayed really didn't change much. He used the same cues, had the same mannerisms, and was for the most part displaying a message that was consistent with his normal behavior. That surprised me. I had expected to see him become more aggressive, or more comfortable, or have some drastic change in his demeanor - and I expected to be able to easily identify it from his nonverbal displays. That didn't really happen, but that isn't to say there wasn't a change.
While the change wasn't in the type of cues or the feeling or meaning behind them, there was a drastic change in their delivery. He became much more animated and there was an obvious over-exaggeration of his nonverbal displays. The more he drank, the bigger and more obvious his cues became. He appeared to put more effort into communicating and relaying messages nonverbally.
When he was nervous or uneasy, he would run his right hand along his left forearm to comfort himself. It started with a small slow motion, mostly concentrated around the wrist, moving back and forth a couple of times. By the end of the night, he was moving all the way from the wrist to almost the elbow, back and forth abruptly upwards of ten times.
When he was demonstrating concern, he would make eye contact with someone and touch something or someone around him with his right hand open wide, lightly resting his fingertips. It started with a brief second of contact, but by the end of the night, he was putting his hand on someone's shoulder and staring them directly in the face for fifteen seconds to show he cared.
We he talked loud he TALKED LOUD. When he talked soft he talked soft. And so on, and so on. Each cue becoming more and more obvious as the night went on.
I was fascinated. So much of our communication is nonverbal to begin with that I was surprised to see how much more it was emphasized by my drunk friend. And maybe most shocking to me was the fact that he didn't seem to be any less effective at communicating. His means shifted, but he still able to send messages and receive messages with the people around him.
I also noticed that the more he drank, the less fluent his speech became. He vocalized less frequently and sometimes slurred words or stumbled forming sentences. I wondered, is there some higher cognitive portion of his brain controlling speech and language being blocked or inhibited by the alcohol? Is his brain attempting to access a more primitive nonverbal channel of communication and bypass grammatical specifics?
And along those lines, do we communicate along a proverbial spectrum, substituting nonverbal for verbal and vice versa? We expect a much greater emphasis on the particulars of formal language in a written piece than we do in a casual conversation. And the most passionate and intimate nonverbal displays typically have no grammatical structure at all, like sex or fights. We struggle sometimes to even find or fabricate the words to describe our deepest feelings and paint pictures and build churches and go to all sorts of artistic measures attempting to relay what's inside us. Are there two communication extremes, a verbal and a nonverbal, each a result of the complete absence of the other?
Or, I wondered, does my drunk friend naturally have a desire to communicate with these larger nonverbal displays? Is it more natural for people to communicate with less emphasis on words? Are the rules of language, while undoubtedly one of the most powerful tools and technologies in all of humanity, overstepping their bounds and being socially forced upon us from birth? Are we conforming to a social norm by emphasizing verbal communication and inhibiting and minimizing our nonverbal displays? Maybe words are best left on the paper, and we vocalize them like we eat our broccoli and clean our rooms: because our parents told us to. Was the alcohol simply allowing my friend to let go of and slip away from a societal stigma?
And with all of that, I wonder about the sincerity of my friend's communication. When is he communicating most honestly? When is his communication most raw? When is he most sincere? And more importantly, when is he communicating the most effectively? And by that, I mean when does the message he sends most closely resemble the message someone else receives?
It kind of just blew me away how I gathered all of this by watching a drunk friend. I sincerely think you could conduct a fascinating study on that subject alone. I can't even imagine the data and communication insight you could gain from the same observation on a large scale.
And in closing, I really don't think any of the questions I've stumbled on here have readily available answers. I don't think you can reach a conclusion in one night at one bar watching one drunk guy drink beers. I really don't even think you can even really scratch the surface in a Junemester, and I honestly think it's probably outside the scope of any undergraduate classes our school offers.
That's not a blow to this class. It's a compliment. I'm extremely glad I took this class. Without it, I sincerely doubt a lot of this would have never even crossed my mind. But now my interest has been sparked. My perspective has changed and I've got a slightly broader horizon. I've learned some new things and I'm leaving with more questions than when I came.
And at the end of the day, I think that's what good education is all about.
