🍄 The Listening Muscle

Talk is cheap, try deep listening. Neuroscientists research the hear/listen paradigm while psychologists ponder spatial thinking as the foundation of thought.

Oct 18, 2024

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“We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.” - Epictetus, Greek Stoic philosopher

Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander...Listening to our selves can be enlightening “Aboriginal people practice deep listening, an almost spiritual skill, based on respect,” writes Jens Korff for Australian Aboriginal culture platform Creative Spirits. Called 'dadirri' in the Ngungikurungkurr language of the Daly River, deep listening is inner, still awareness. “Dadirri recognises the deep spring that is inside us,” says Aboriginal writer and senior Elder Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann. “We call on it and it calls to us. It is something like what you call 'contemplation'.”

According to Avi Kluger, professor of organizational behavior at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, listening is a skill that can be practiced. Listening resembles a muscle, he writes in the Harvard Business Review. “It requires training, persistence, effort, and most importantly, the intention to become a good listener. It requires clearing your mind from internal and external noise—and if this isn’t possible, postponing a conversation for when you can truly listen without being distracted.”

🎧 Listen: Navajo Historian, Wally Brown, teaches about the old saying to “Just Listen”.

The noble cause of listening

Being deeply listened to makes us real, writes neuroscientist Mark Brady in Sacred Listening: Further Teachings for Deepening Practice [CreateSpace, 2016]. “Much like Margery Williams' Skin Horse in the children's classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, having someone deeply and truly understand and accept us naked and exposed underneath all the masks and public personas allows us to have the truth of our experience accurately reflected back to us. …Being listened to requires someone to do the listening, someone to bear witness to our deepest being. There is no ‘being listened to’ without a listener, and inevitably both listener and speaker are beneficially changed in the process,” claims Brady, the Honorable Director of non-profit The Global Listening Centre (GLC).

The hear/listen paradigm

Hearing and listening are related but distinct processes, writes communication-development company Speakeasy. Hearing is the passive act of perceiving sound using the ears, an automatic physiological process that does not require effort or attention. “Listening, in contrast, is the active process of making meaning from sound signals. Listening requires focused attention, intention, and conscious effort to understand. Hearing is involuntary and listening is voluntary. Hearing involves only the ears, while listening engages the brain to interpret meaning. Hearing can be passive, but listening requires active effort and attention. Hearing is about perceiving sounds and listening is making sense of sounds.”

The lost art of listening

The effect of bad listening is profound, says New York Times contributor Kate Murphy. “Anyone who has shared something personal and received a thoughtless or uncomprehending response knows how it makes your soul want to crawl back into its hiding place,” she writes in You’re Not Listening, What You’re Missing & Why it Matters [Harvill Secker, 2020].

Murphy spent two years analyzing academic research on listening and interviewed numerous people who are paid to listen including spies, priests and psychotherapists. “Everyone is so intent on expressing their own opinion, or they’re so distracted by technology or by their own thoughts, that it’s making us isolated, misinformed and intolerant,” Murphy tells The Guardian. “I wanted to raise awareness of the value and great joy of listening.”

Active listening

Your lips move, but I can’t hear what you’re saying …

For those that do listen well, psychologists Carl Rogers and Richard Farson coined the term “active listening” in 1957. It presents the method as one that “requires that we get inside the speaker, that we grasp, from his point of view, just what it is he is communicating to us. More than that, we must convey to the speaker that we are seeing things from his point of view.”

Active listening is a communication skill that involves going beyond simply hearing the words that another person speaks. “It's about actively processing and seeking to understand the meaning and intent behind them. It requires being a mindful and focused participant in the communication process,” explains clinical psychologist Arlin Cuncic, author of The Anxiety Workbook [2017, Callisto Media].

Active listening techniques include: being fully present in the conversation, showing interest by practicing good eye contact, noticing (and using) non-verbal cues, asking open-ended questions to encourage further responses, paraphrasing and reflecting back what has been said, listening to understand rather than to respond, and withholding judgment and advice.

Active listening involves mastering a whole host of other skills — from learning how to read subtle cues to controlling your own emotional response. It requires both empathy and self-awareness, writes workplace expert Amy Gallo for Harvard Business Review. “Active listening is when you not only hear what someone is saying, but also attune to their thoughts and feelings. It turns a conversation into an active, non-competitive, two-way interaction.”

Clinical psychologist Sabrina Romanoff tells Verywellmind that deep listening “requires de-centering from one’s fixed position to be fully present with another. It helps people feel more understood and strengthens relationships as it signals a willingness to sit with the other’s perspective and empathy for their situation instead of singular focus on oneself."

Listen, freedom

The “talking stick”, originally referred to as a speaker's staff, is a tool of Indigenous democracy used by many tribes, especially the indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast in North America. The talking stick is passed around the group and allows for multiple people to speak in turn.

In the wake of George Floyd’s death, Rory Tyer, an executive coach for Go Innovation attended a protest rally and community listening session in a small Southern U.S. town. “It was encouraging to see a crowd composed of people from many ages, races, and social backgrounds,” he writes. During the listening session, people signed up for two-minute slots and stood in front of the crowd with a microphone. There was no agenda except to listen. “If I had to summarize one of the major themes I heard repeated in different ways by people of color, it would be this: Nobody has listened to us, and that’s why you’re seeing the anger and passion you’re seeing now. Nobody has listened.”

“For our freedom of speech to work—to have meaning or the power to improve our democracy—we need to listen to one another,” writes Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation. “In fact, we have a responsibility to listen, because listening allows us to extend the freedom of speech to others. This is why the right to assemble is so closely linked to the right to free speech. They share an amendment because speech is meaningless without an audience.”

The disconnection problem

“We’ve become ideologically segregated,” writes Ryan Kashtan for the Listen First Project, which comprises 500 organizations combating toxic division by bringing Americans together. Modern media has created more options than ever for us to reinforce our own worldviews. He claims that we listen to our favorite news sources, and on Facebook, we de-friend those who disagree with us—or, as he claims, we at least roll our eyes when they post. “When we’re confronted with something we don’t like, we reflexively lash out. We double down, we entrench ourselves, and we recite our most battle-worn talking points. In other words, we’ve lost our ability to listen. Yes, we hear those with whom we disagree. But our visceral reactions take over from there. When we don’t understand or accept another point of view, we don’t ask questions. We don’t engage in conversation. We don’t probe for common ground. We seek either submission or vengeance. We accuse and insult.”

Speech bubbles

Not only are we actively disconnecting from one another’s humanity—even as we become more connected than ever before—but we also seem more willing and able to disconnect from certain kinds of information, writes Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation. “We tend to curate the information that comes our way, while social and commercial media try to give us what they think we want. We engage with stories that confirm our assumptions and biases, that do not challenge or expand our view of the world. Online monologues allow their writers to dig deeper and deeper into their own thoughts without considering the views of others. We become more entrenched in our own views. In some cases, it is almost as if we’re just talking to ourselves.”

This shows up on a bigger platform. Kate Murphy argues that our growing failure to listen has dire political consequences because we are no longer willing to engage with our opponents’ points of view, writes The Guardian. In the US, for instance, “senators used to meet in a communal dining room where they talked to each other… They humanized each other. Now people are intent on being separate and demonizing one another. It’s not just that they don’t agree. They think the other person is bad… You can’t start listening if you think the other person is fundamentally an idiot or a bad person.”

“Democracy, as with all human endeavors, is imperfect,” continues Kashtan. But that imperfection is not an excuse for ambivalence or complacency. Consensus building and compromise require real effort and difficult tradeoffs. “We won’t always agree. Even with a common set of facts, no two people share the same set of values. But we should cherish the diversity of our values and seek to meld their strengths in our common pursuit of a more perfect union and a more peaceful and prosperous world. Without trying to understand the different experiences that have shaped our disparate ways of life, we risk never-ending gridlock, stagnation, and in our darkest moments, even war. But if we can start with a shared sense of facts, and explain to one another why we react to and interpret those facts the way we do, we can heal our divisions.”

Into the deep

“Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly, all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. You are a result of the love of thousands.” —Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw novelist, essayist, and environmentalist.

A beautiful expression from Central Australia is "Can they bend the knees?" writes Korff for Creative Spirits. It inquires if you can sit down and truly listen, it is not only a prerequisite for effectively absorbing information, “but also an allusion to how information is passed on in that area: by sitting on the red Earth.”

Indigenous Elders teach their young about true listening, writes Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) in Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth. “Listening that keeps us (1) remembering the ultimate, longer-term importance of our decisions and actions; (2) never forgetting our interconnectedness with all; (3) appreciating the nature of feelings and how they often relate to forgetting to accept the unknown; (4) holding onto authentic humility; and (5) remembering who we really are, with great appreciation for those who came before us who did similar work or who have made our work somewhat easier or clearer.”

I hear you

“I use Deep Listening to guide me in hearing the voices of my ancestors, listening to the land, the sea and the stars and hearing the stories that want to be told,” said Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann. “In our Aboriginal way, we learn to listen from our earliest days. We could not live good and useful lives unless we listened. This was the normal way for us to learn… our people have passed on this way of listening for over 40,000 years.”

Because Aboriginal people passed on stories orally, listening to other people was imperative. Listening to the storyteller was vital to reproduce the story accurately to the next generation of storytellers, writes Korff. “Deep listening describes the processes of deep and respectful listening to build community—a way of encouraging people to explore and learn from the ancient heritage of Aboriginal culture, knowledge and understanding.”

The word for deep listening in the Yorta Yorta language of the Murray River in Victoria is “Gulpa Ngawal” explains Laura Brearley, editor of the Gulpa Ngawal Indigenous Deep Listening book. “The closest we can get to describing it in English is deep and respectful listening which builds community,” says Brearley, a researcher at The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Deep listening draws on many senses beyond what is simply heard. It can take place in silence. Deep listening can be applied as a way of being together, as a research methodology and as a way of making a difference. “It’s about tuning in, and ‘is based on stories, silences and the spaces that lie between.”

Background noise

Accused of selective hearing? You could be off the hook. A report published in the Journal of Neuroscience shows how people who are focused on visual tasks (yes, looking at your phone) can’t hear what's going on around them. This is because hearing and vision tap the same brain region, called the association cortex. “You may think that the person is ignoring you,” said study co-author Nilli Lavie, a professor of psychology and brain sciences at University College London. “But their brain just can’t respond to your voice.” The researchers have dubbed this “inattentional deafness.” The more taxing the visual task, the less likely the person is going to hear you, reports Today.

Wandering minds

And that’s not all. The physiological reason our minds wander, even when we try to listen, is because the human brain is capable of processing words at a much higher speed than a person is able to speak. The average rate of speech for an American is about 125 words per minute; the human brain can process about 800 words per minute. “While a speaker’s words enter our brain at slow speed, we continue to think at high speed. So, we have plenty of time to absorb the words we hear and still think of other things at the same time,” reports Speakeasy.

Words have left the chat

Actions speak louder than words—and happen first and faster, says Barbara Tversky, emerita Professor of Psychology at Stanford. In her book Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought [Hachette, 2019], Tversky says that “spatial thinking” is the foundation of thought and evolved long before language. Catching a falling cup, rolling your eyes—responses like these happen before people find the words to describe their actions and emotions.

“We quickly grasp each other’s actions and intentions and use those to plan our own,” writes Tversky, now Professor of Psychology at Columbia University. “All that happens far too fast for words.” Think of Einstein imagining flying into space at the speed of light, an architect designing a building, a coach planning a football play and the players executing it.

Spatial thinking comes from moving and acting in the world. All creatures must do so to survive. According to Tversky, actions in space create spatial representations in the brain; simply looking isn’t enough. Spatial thinking is supported by all our senses. “Altogether half the cortex is involved in spatial thinking. What’s amazing is that abstract thought uses the same brain circuitry that underlies spatial thought.”

The world is speaking, if we listen

Plants and animals, including humans, feel sound as well as hear it, and some of the most meaningful audio communication happens at frequencies that people can't hear. Frequency is the speed of vibrations, and it can travel in waves where the highs and the lows determine the pitch of sound. So sound is vibrational frequency we can hear, and nature can too. Nature has a unique ability to use frequency and sounds for communicating, and we are learning how to listen to its magical chorus.

“The people [aborigines] themselves say, ‘Don’t you know anything? The plants talk to us.’” —Dr. Wade Davis, anthropologist and Explorer in Residence, National Geographic Society, Alice interview, 2002

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