LIFE WITH A CAPITAL ‘L’  Cpt. TWO, sec.1  “LISTENING”

This is a true story and fitting, though perhaps not genteel. It began, “Charles Ray, are you listening to me?!”

That was my mother’s voice in the kitchen speaking harshly to my eleven-year-old big brother who was in some sort of trouble. His answer was “No, I’m listening to Granny.”

Our diminutive grandmother was also in the kitchen. She had just unintentionally but loudly passed gas.

The great sixteenth-century artist Benvenuto Cellini tells a similar story of listening to his friend Agnolo break the power of a dark and terrifying occasion when he “let fly such a volley from his breech that it was far more effectual than . . . asafetida.” Forgive the pun, but listening is not a passive exercise. Often it is, as it was in these cases, a welcomed avenue to unimaginable relief. Listening is an exercise of hearing but it is not to be confused with hearing. 

Chuck heard our mother but was listening to granny. Unless injury or a head cold prevents the normal course of things, we are always hearing. Three divisions of the ear, outer, middle, and inner, collect puffs of air (sound waves), whirl them through a coil or two, round the three smallest bones in the body transform these pressure movements into electrochemical impulses, then shoot them a short distance along an auditory nerve through brain stem and mid-brain to the temporal lobe where, with the aid of Heschl’s gyri, auditory reception is translated into perception. That is hearing. 

Listening is selective and attentive hearing;the sort done by a French friend of ours who owns a recording studio. My husband, David, watched him perfect a German language radio commercial. He revised repeatedly. Listen, change, listen, re-tape, listen, sing, tape, listen. When Dave asked why such caution and care, Marc bared his great crocodile smile and said, “Beeg bucks!” There is no question about it: motivation improves listening. 

Americans are motivated to pour “beeg bucks” into communication methodology, but more often than not that means speaking skills. We learn to verbally confront, convince, confuse, or confound. Speaking is important, of course. But whereas all forms of speaking ten to improve as people relax and situations become familiar, listening disintegrates in that same circumstance. 

A long-term marriage, and may there be more of them, is a premiere example. Statistics and personal experience suggest the longer couples remain together the less likely they are to listen to one another. Why? It is proven that people predict the ideas of those they frequently hear. Our minds work much faster than our mouths (we speak around 150 words per minute but we think between 600 and 1,200 words in the same period of time), so an undisciplined ear jumps ahead of a speaker. Like my somewhat-black-lab who thinks she knows which direction we will go when I walk. She walks twice as far as our near-golden retriever, Ivy, who stays by my side. Storge doubles back, runs, doubles back, but never ceases to believe in her predictions. Goodness, by the time a verbalizer winds down, we hearers have circled round their thoughts three or four time, we have mentally finished for then and have practiced, at least once, the response we plan to the message we, ah, anticipated. As you might guess, this skill of neglect affects all forms of human cooperation: work, marriage, friendship, family. Unless we deliberately listen, we hear what we plan to hear and goodness knows where we wind up. 

Tests that examine speech perception verify that when listening to a continuous speech pattern—that is, conversation as opposed to a list being read—people regularly hear sound that is not present. Just as the brain compensates for the blind spot that is before every human eye by finishing up visual pictures, the brain also makes major assumptions through our ears. How good of it. 

To avoid a labyrinth of detail, in which I too get lost, may it suffice to summarize. Studies show we depend heavily upon the influences of our own grammatical and semantic context (inside our heads) in making decisions about what we perceive (from outside our heads). That is, our very mind’s programming assists us in hearing assumptions rather than people. One researcher said people are “making good the inadequacies of what they hear.” Is that a kind way of saying we prefer our own point of view?

I love it. We hear. We frequently do not listen. Realizing this, one night expect people to be concerned, to pay some “beeg bucks” for some listening skills. On the contrary, most of us prefer using our beeg bucks for hot fudge sundaes and cable TV. We contentedly maintain old, familiar patterns of response like: increased volume, increased emotional intensity, increased rejection of differing views, abrupt suspension of bothersome verbal exchanges, ridicule, red faces, red necks, red flags, put-downs, or flat denials. Perhaps you have noticed, few people listen well. But real people must.

Coming: “Peripheral Silence—The Place of a Listener”

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