Communication – The Blind Men and the Elephant

Hi everyone when we were in our tutorial last week about communication I couldn’t help but think about one of the stories I loved from when I was younger and think about some of the underlying themes which I never considered before. The story I’m referring to is “The blind men and the elephant”. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about I will give a recap.

In the story six blind men come across an elephant, each man touched a different part of the elephant and was positive that they knew what the elephant looked like. However they argued and could not come up with an agreement on what the elephant looked like. They argued wither the elephant looked like a wall, a spear, a fan, a tree trunk, a piece of string, or a snake.

Clearly the six blind men were missing an important aspect of communication. When I was younger I thought the story was funny cause all of the men got it wrong and didn’t even think about combining there knowledge, but after our last tutorial I think that the story is symbolic of how important communication is and shows the effects of what can happen if poor communication happens. It seems that the six blind men were just communicating on a factual level and did not move on to the next stage of communication.

Do you guys think that the six blind men missed out on a lot of the non-verbal communication cues such as body language and eye-contact since they were blind? From what we discussed in our last tutorial can you guys think of anything else about communication that relates to this story?

I also like this story because it shows that everybody sees that world differently from each other and just because someone has a different view from you does not mean that they are wrong, as the six blind men show each of them were right in there own way.