THE ABILITY TO BE UNDERSTOOD WITHOUT WORDS

When you remove words from our ability to make ourselves understood - it doesn't go well...

To prove this, I urge you to buy the greatest family board game called "Telestrations".

It is the first game I have played that has no winner and demonstrates how hopeless (and hilarious) we are at conveying meaning with drawing only.

It works like this - in a group of 6+ players, each player writes down a secret word (can be a thing or a concept) and passes it to the next person who then has to draw something to convey that word. This is then passed to the next person who has to guess what the word is and write it down. This guess then goes to the next person who has to draw this guess. That drawing then goes to the next person who has to write down what they guess it is... and so on. When the word finally travels all the way around to the original person who wrote the word in the first place, you go through and present the funny drawings and interpretations to see what happened!

Basically, it is like the game "Chinese whispers" but using drawing instead of talking.

It is hilarious how the word "Canada" became "snowman" and "knuckle" became a "wedding". It was only twice the word managed to make it around and sort of stay the same!

It was so fascinating to see people get distracted by something in a drawing or misinterpret what something was.

We are certainly unreliable when you take away our ability to speak and write in words.

It's a good lesson to remember when we ride our horses around and don't even have pictures for them to follow. Instead, they have to work out what we mean from the way we create pressure on their face or touch their sides with our legs, etc.

Removing words from us makes things hard for us, and I believe that needs to be more understood. When you learn to communicate with horses in this primary "touch" language, you have to really get your head around it and practice it.

Otherwise, the inevitable happens and we end up not communicating and physically pulling and hauling on them instead.

So remember this:

Sure, horses can learn to understand visual signals from us and the odd word or sound. But we mainly communicate with them via a form of touch language that they feel on their bodies, mouths, face, etc.

Finally, get this game, turn your mobile phones off and have a great time!

Image: This is definitely not the quality of drawing you will find playing the game!

P.S. This is not Pictionary, it's even better!