A while back, I mentioned to a friend an interesting little factoid about life that I had noticed. Fast forward a few months when, due to life circumstances, this friend also figured the same thing out. He then proceed to tell me excitedly about it, as if he had never heard it before. I chuckled inside as I realized, like many before, that people will not "hear" what you tell them if they are not ready to hear it. As Simon & Garfunkel put it: "a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."
 
A related anecdote happened when I was in my car listening to a song that embodied the style of music I loved in my late teens/early twenties. "This is #@*! awesome", I thought. Then, a friend entered my car, a friend who grew up in a different environment and whose "soundtrack of youth" was different than mine. He was completely unmoved by the song that had so moved me. The different musical environments in which we each grew up in affected which pieces moved me and which pieces moved him.

I've been trying for a while to come up with a good analogy that encompasses the behavior seen in both of the above stories, and I think I found it. I refer to this behavior/phenomenon as trying to paint on an already-painted-on canvas.

Essentially, if you have a canvas that has already been painted on, in some parts red, in some parts blue, in some parts white, etc, then, if you start painting, say, yellow, on top of that, what you will get is some parts becoming orange, some green, and only where the canvas was white will you actually get the yellow color that you intended to get.

The brain is like a canvas. All our previous experiences are brush strokes of different colors, shaping the overall look of the canvas. These brush strokes also influence how future brush strokes affect the look of the canvas. The look of the canvas represents the state of our brain, the current set of our likes and dislikes, what moves us and what doesn't, what messages we "hear" and what we don't hear, etc.

I think that this is intuitively understood by people who are naturally good communicators. Just as one canvas may require a green brush stroke and another may require a blue brush stroke to achieve the same final look, depending on the background of the canvases, so can one person require a different argument/approach than another person to achieve the same outcome. The outcome can be that you convince them of your position, to vote for your candidate, to go to a music concert with you, or you manage to calm and comfort someone in a time of sorrow.
 
People who are bad communicators think "I want blue to appear on these canvases, so I'll just get a brush and dip it in blue paint, and paint over all the canvases. If they don't all show blue when I'm done, it's not my fault. The canvases must be defective".

Sometimes, of course, no matter what color you add, the outcome is the same. This happens in cases like trying to explain to a non-parent what being a parent feels like, or trying to explain to a blind person what orange is or looks like. It's as if there is a big patch of black paint on the canvas that hasn't dried yet. Sometimes that patch of paint dries and new colors start showing up when painted on top of it, but sometimes that patch remains unchanged.

This analogy is not only about how we respond to someone's verbal arguments on some topic, this is about how we respond to almost anything in life. The set of things each of us goes through in life helps shape our "canvas" and so helps determine our tastes, i.e. how we respond to specific pieces of music, art, books, movies, food, etc, but also helps determine our outlook on life, i.e. how we respond to various "truths" about life, marriage, children, the universe, religion, etc.

If there is a practical takeaway from all this it's the following: When talking to people, appreciate the fact that they are an already-painted-on canvas, take the time to learn what colors are already there, and how those colors will interact with and affect the colors you are about to add.