Patrick Henry Winston - Make It Clear: Speak and Write to Persuade and Inform

Communication is, without question, the most important enabler of human civilization.

Without our sophisticated ability to communicate, we would still be living in caves, desperately searching for resources, while living in fear of predators.

Every man-made thing, from cars to computers to poetry, results from communication.

And yet, the communication bandwidth between human beings is limited to rates on the order of 10 bits per second of Shannon entropy. This rate is astonishingly lowabout the same whether we communicate through voice or through writing. By comparison, even ordinary personal computers today can communicate with one another at a gigabit per second100 million times faster than human communication.

You can think of Shannon entropy as the amount of information that results from the most effective possible compression.

How do we overcome our extraordinary communication bandwidth limitation?

We do so by exploiting the subject of this bookour ability to tell stories that evoke imagination.

Whenever a speaker communicates with a listener, the speaker evokes in the listeners mind a picturea modelof what is being described. The speakers words guide the listeners model, assembling in their mind complex ideas drawn from the shared heritage and experience of the speaker and listener.

I use the words speaker and listener interchangeably with writer and reader, respectively.

This model-based communication technique serves the function of compression, with the shared heritage and experiences of both parties playing the role of the constellation of code words used in typical computational data compression.

So, part of the art of effective human communications is the art of compressing data to get through an incredibly small 10 bit/s bottleneck.

The other part of effective communication is holding your audiences interest by having a model of their emotional mind, and evoking and steering their emotions with skill.

There have been few practitioners of both parts of this art more intelligent, capable, and kind than this books author, Patrick Henry Winston.

I knew Patrick for 40 years, from my arrival at MIT as a freshman in 1979 to a few days before his passing in 2019, when I had the good fortune of talking to him about communication one last time. Despite the stark setting of his hospital room and illness, we spoke about many things.

First, how the order of 10 bits/s limit seems to exist even for esoteric modes of human communication, like EEG.

We spoke about how even our visual system may not convey any higher Shannon entropy due to the compression of retinal images into cognitive meaning by the visual cortex. We discussed how several organizations, including DARPA and startups like Neuralink, are exploring whether novel brain interfaces can surpass this limit. We were both skeptical. Perhaps the cognitive part of our brain faces fundamental limits of input/output information bandwidth that render it impossible to easily surpass the efficiency of normal human communication.

We spoke finally about the second part of communication beyond data compressionthe art of storytelling and the skill of accurately estimating a listeners state of mind and telling a story in a way to elicit interest. We spoke about how understanding the human mind well enough to draw engagement and focus from ones audience remains a rare, but teachable skill.

Patrick taught many of us this art. We learned it by listening to him lecture, and by listening to him lecture about lecturing.

It is hard to describe the joy of being a student of a great teacher. I had the fortune of having Patrick as my greatest teacher of communication. As is true for many others, I owe Patrick a great deal, and I use the lessons he taught me every day.

I cannot imagine a better teacher of this subject than Patrick, or a better storyteller on the art of storytelling.

You are in for a treat.

Gill Pratt

SB 83, SM 87, PhD 89
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

CEO, Toyota Research Institute

Fellow, Toyota Motor Corporation