Context is Everything

What does the painting above mean to you? If you're not already familiar with it you will most likely be drawn to the themes that align with your current contextual window. Let me invite you to shift that window by directing your attention to Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper below.

Now, allow me to offer one more shift. Consider Vincent van Gogh’s connection to Christianity and take a moment to count the figures present at each meal. What does Vincent van Gogh's Café Terrace at Night mean to you now¹?

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Context is everything.

What comes to mind when reading this maxim? Ironically, your context, the summation of your life experiences uniquely determine the answer to this.

Perhaps a time you gravely misunderstood another's intent came to mind. Although, given the frequency of misunderstandings in day-to-day life, it is more likely that the concept of misunderstanding came to mind than a single occurrence.

Or, if you have engaged in the recent explosion of generative AI, context in terms of its use to empower tools may have jumped to mind. For the generative AI unfamiliar, context is the name given to the input (e.g. text, images, sound) provided to a generative AI model to generate its output.

Context, reductively put, is the result of combining external input with an internal model, used to produce an output. External input can take countless forms, including, but not limited to: words, speech, tone of voice, volume, facial expressions, body language, temperature & pain. Our internal model is an amalgamation of associations created from responding to the ceaseless barrage of external inputs across a lifetime. From our first breath we learn to navigate the world by exploration, storing the reaction of each whim & interaction (what happens when I try to pull this cat's tail?) in our brain's model of the world. In simpler terms, learning enriches a model, increasing its capacity to respond in alignment with the actor's desires when presented to a previously unseen scenario (I must not pull this sleeping tiger's tail).

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.
- Benjamin Franklin, 1789

Somewhat paradoxically, I propose adding a third certainty to Franklin's idiom: the unknown.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.
- Mike Tyson

You cannot plan for the unknown. You can, however, prepare for it. By enriching your model of the world, you have a greater chance at leveraging the unknown.

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A Lifelong Endeavour

Tread the path of curiosity—venture into the woods, push past the branches, and you’ll uncover the rich, hanging fruits of discovery. Each step marks a new point on your evolving internal contextual map. You return to the tribe, eager to share the updates to your internal map, hoping they too will benefit from the fruits of your labor. Your tribe members listen intently to every word you utter, each micro-expression & subtle intonation in your voice weaves a different story to each receptive, contextually biased, pair of ears. Each syllable spoken plots another uniquely distinct point in the listener's brain tissue, resulting in a unique variation of the map for each listener (at complete unawares to the speaker).

You might be familiar of the school game, Grapevine. If you're not, this is how it works: children form a circle and a child is chosen to whisper a secret message to the child next to them. This child repeats what they heard in a whisper to their neighbour. The passing of the message continues all the way around the circle until the final child, who exclaims the message for all to hear. More often than not the message has changed drastically from its original conception due to the compounding effect of mishearing & misunderstanding across each child. The longer the circle of children, the more profound the distortion effect.

This effect is not limited to the classroom. Every person has their own unique contextual understanding. A message leaving the horse's mouth can never carry the full contextual base of the speaker, words are too limiting. Propagated across many sets of mouths and ears, each with their own set of contextual understanding, the message becomes quickly diluted from its original intended meaning.

As humans our distinct advantage is the ability to collaborate (on a large scale) and share context among peers, this is the foremost reason for our success and likely the reason we no longer share the earth with other human species² (e.g. Neanderthals). The technological age, particularly since the dawn of the internet, is eroding people's innate ability to communicate effectively on a large scale. The rise of the internet has enabled individuals to specialise to a higher degree than any point in history, forming collaborative & social bonds with people beyond their local tribe. Hyper-specialisation is great for the exploration of an individual's own intellectual propensity but this inevitably causes difficulties communicating across interests. There just isn't enough shared base context between the two parties.

To counteract the degradation of communication we must venture out from our silos and break down barriers. Share your context with another and onboard their's. Context doesn't overwrite—it layers, increasing depth and meaning with each exchange.

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Tip of the Tongue

Dragon (potential investor): Which component of the product is your intellectual property?

Pitcher: It's the um...uhh.. it has been a while since I dealt with the patent, I can't remember, I'm sorry

- BBC, Dragon's Den

The Dragons' piercing eyes bore into him, triggering a tempest in his mind. He unfurls his mental map—raindrops batter the parchment, the wind tugging it violently as he struggles to hold on. His eyes dart frantically across the faded ink, searching for the location of the patent, only to find it too obscured to read. Frustrated, he curses himself for failing to retrace the path before stepping into the storm.

This incredibly common phenomenon is a temporary retrieval failure, not a memory storage problem, but a difficulty in accessing the phonological information connected to the semantic knowledge³.

An inventor lives and dies by their invention. It is unsurprising that this pitcher forewent revision of their product—the ins and outs of which they presume to know as well as their own body—in preparation for their pitch. Unfortunately, high pressure scenarios like this can exacerbate the phenomenon, turning well-trodden neural paths into overgrown trails, obscuring even the most familiar routes to critical knowledge.

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A Map Never Complete

Context is not static, it's a dynamic entity, ever-changing through each experience, conversation and insight. It's the fluid map that we mould to form our reality, providing us with a guiding torch through the unknown. Context is everything we make it.