I spent the past weekend attending a conference that I had helped to plan. As is now often the case, this was a hybrid conference; you could choose to attend in person or online via Zoom. Although it involved a long plane ride, I choose to attend in person. It could be because – as a planner – I wanted to see how the event played out. Also, it’s been a long time since I attended a conference away from my home. Or – maybe – it was just FOMO.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad I was there, in the room.

This was a very small conference planned on a shoestring budget. We didn’t have money for extensive IT support or AV equipment. We were dependent solely on a laptop and whatever sound equipment our host was able to supply. We knew going into the conference that this would make for a less-than-ideal experience for those attending virtually. But – even accounting for that – I found there was a huge gap in the quality of that experience between those that were there and those that were attending online. And, over the duration of the 3-day conference, I observed why that might be so.

This conference was a 50/50 mix of those that already knew each other and those that were meeting each other for the first time. Even those who were familiar with each other tended to connect more often via a virtual meeting platform than in a physical meeting space. I know that despite the convenience and efficiency of being able to meet online, something is lost in the process. After the past two days, carefully observing what was happening in the room we were all in, I have a better understanding of what that loss might be – it was the vague and inexact art of creating a real bond with another person.

In that room, the bonding didn’t happen at the speaking podium and very seldom happened during the sessions we so carefully planned. It seeped in on the sidelines, over warmed-over coffee from conference centre urns, overripe bananas and the detritus of the picked over pastry tray. The bonding came from all of us sharing and digesting a common experience. You could feel a palpable energy in the room. You could pick up the emotion, read the body language and tune in to the full bandwidth of communication that goes far beyond what could be transmitted between an onboard microphone and a webcam.

But it wasn’t just the sharing of the experience that created the bonds. It was the digesting of those experiences after the fact. We humans are herding animals, and that extends to how we come to consensus about things we go through together. We do so through communication with others – not just with words and gesture, but also through the full bandwidth of our evolved mechanisms for coming to a collective understanding. It wasn’t just that a camera and microphone couldn’t transmit that effectively, it was that it happened where there was no camera or mic.

As researchers have discovered, there is a lived reality and a remembered reality and often, they don’t look very much alike. The difference between the effectiveness of an in-person experience and one accessed through an online platform shouldn’t come as a surprise to us. This is due to how our evolved sense-making mechanisms operate. We make sense of reality both internally, through a comparison with our existing cognitive models and externally, through interacting with others around us who have shared that same reality. This communal give-and-take colors what we take with us, in the form of both memories and an updated model of what we know and believe. When it comes to how humans are built, collective sense making is a feature, not a bug.

I came away from that conference with much more than the content that was shared at the speaker dais. I also came away with a handful of new relationships, built on sharing an experience and, through that, laying down the first foundations of trust and familiarity. I would not hesitate to reach out to any of these new friends if I had a question about something or a project I felt they could collaborate on.

I think that’s true largely because I was in the room where it happened.