by Kate Murphy
Neuroscientist Uri Hasson looked at fMRI scans and found that the greater the overlap between the speaker’s brain activity and the listener’s brain activity, the better the communication. In one experiment conducted in his lab at Princeton University, subjects listened to another subject describe a scene from the BBC television series Sherlock. During the recollection, the speaker’s brain waves looked much the same as when the speaker was actually watching the show. Upon hearing the story, the listeners’ brains began to show the same neural pattern as the speaker’s. This coupling, or syncing, of brain waves is visible, measurable proof of the transmission of thoughts, feelings, and memories.
A subsequent study conducted by researchers at the University of California–Los Angeles and Dartmouth College showed that the brains of good friends react similarly when watching short video clips. In fact, the more in line the subjects’ brain activity while watching the videos (of baby sloths, an unknown couple’s wedding, and a debate over whether to ban college football), the closer the subjects were as friends. This is partly due to the fact that people with similar sensibilities gravitate toward one another. But if considered in conjunction with Hasson’s findings, it also suggests who we listen to shapes how we think and react. Our brains not only sync up the moment someone tells us something, the resulting understanding and connection influences how we process subsequent information (even videos of baby sloths). The more you listen to someone, such as a close friend or a family member, and the more that person listens to you, the more likely you two will be of like minds.
Consider the synchrony that developed between psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Their work on judgment and decision-making represents some of the most influential scholarship in behavioral economics and is the basis of Kahneman’s bestselling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. The pair were very different personalities—Tversky was impulsive and brazen while Kahneman was more reticent and considered. But they clicked through many hours of conversation—arguing, laughing, and occasional shouting—leading to many eureka moments neither could have accomplished alone.
Kahneman and Tversky spent so much time together, their wives became jealous. “Their relationship was more intense than a marriage,” said Tversky’s wife, Barbara. “I think they were both turned on intellectually more than either had ever been before. It was as if they were both waiting for it.” When they wrote their research papers, the two men would sit side by side at a single typewriter. “We were sharing a mind,” said Kahneman, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, six years after Tversky’s death.
* * *
Our desire to have our brains sync, or to connect, with another person is basic and starts at birth. We are all “waiting for it.” It’s how we find friends, create partnerships, advance ideas, and fall in love. But if that yearning is not satisfied, particularly when we’re very young, it can profoundly affect our well-being. No psychological concept emphasizes this more than attachment theory. It’s the idea that our ability to listen and connect with people as adults is shaped by how well our parents listened and connected with us as children.
By the end of our first year, we have imprinted on our baby brains a template of how we think relationships work, based on how attuned our parents or primary caregivers were to our needs. In other words, your ability to form attachments, or your attachment style, is determined by the degree to which your caregivers’ brain waves synced with yours. Attentive and responsive caregivers set you up to have a secure attachment style, which is characterized by an ability to listen empathetically and thus, form functional, meaningful, and mutually supportive relationships.
On the other hand, children whose parents were not dependably attentive typically grow up to be adults with an insecure anxious attachment style, which means they tend to worry and obsess about relationships. They do not listen well because they are so concerned about losing people’s attention and affection. This preoccupation can lead them to be overly dramatic, boastful, or clingy. They might also pester potential friends, colleagues, clients, or romantic interests instead of allowing people their space.
An insecure avoidant attachment style comes from growing up with caregivers who were mostly inattentive—or perhaps overly attentive, to the point of smothering. People raised this way are often bad listeners because they tend to shut down or leave relationships whenever things get too close. They resist listening because they don’t want to be disappointed or overwhelmed.
Finally, people who have an insecure disorganized attachment style display both anxious and avoidant behaviors in an illogical and erratic manner. This is often the result of growing up with a caregiver who was threatening or abusive. It’s really hard to listen if you have a disorganized attachment style because intimacy can feel scary or frightening. Of course, not everyone fits neatly into one of these categories. Most people land somewhere along a continuum from secure to insecure. And, if more on the insecure side, you’re on a continuum from anxious to avoidant.
But history doesn’t have to be destiny when it comes to attachment styles. People can change how they are in relationships when they learn to listen and be emotionally responsive to others. And just as important, they must allow people to listen and be emotionally responsive to them—that is, they must form secure attachments. More often, though, people spend their lives seeking or creating circumstances that reproduce what they knew in childhood. They selectively listen to people who sound like who they heard first and, thus, reinforce old neural pathways. They are trying to sync in a way that feels familiar—like following old ruts in a dirt road.
An example is the gregarious owner of a shipping business I met several years ago while on assignment in New Orleans. Married multiple times, he talked entertainingly, if incessantly, answering his own questions and interrupting anyone who tried to get a word in. He talked loudly, almost like a stage actor, further discouraging input or participation from anyone else. It emerged during a rare reflective moment that as a child, whenever he tried to talk to his father, particularly about anything bothering him, his father would shut him down with an abrupt, “That’s enough of that.” Talking about your feelings, he said, shrugging off one of my questions, is how you “lose your audience.” And that was something he seemed desperate to avoid, having grown up deprived of one. He couldn’t tolerate syncing on another wavelength.
Several programs have emerged in the last decade to address the lack of resonance, or syncing, between parent and child, which leads to a cycle of disconnectedness passed down from generation to generation. Intervention strategies like Circle of Security, Group Attachment-Based Intervention, and Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-Up essentially teach parents of young children how to listen and respond to their babies and toddlers before dysfunctional neural patterns get grooved into their tiny developing brains—that is, before children develop lifelong anxious and/or avoidant approaches to relationships. While the programs focus on helping parents listen to their kids, participants report using the same strategies to improve their relationships with spouses, coworkers, and friends.
Our culture makes it hard for people to listen even in the best of circumstances. But it’s even tougher for participants in some of these programs, many of whom experienced abuse or neglect when they were growing up. Given they expect criticism or insult, they’ve developed a resistance to listening, either by tuning out or talking over people, without realizing it—like the shipping magnate in New Orleans. And yet, these programs have had tremendous success. Their efficacy, measured by marked reductions in children’s problem behaviors and parents’ improved listening skills, has been validated in several published studies. But the real proof is the growing demand for these programs worldwide. Within the past ten years, Circle of Security alone has trained more than thirty thousand facilitators in twenty-two countries.
* * *
Many of the attachment-based programs incorporate video. In the moment, people are often too distracted by the
demands of their everyday lives, or are too much in their own heads, to realize when they are being inattentive. But with video, human interactions can be paused, slowed down, and watched frame by frame. For training purposes, program facilitators, usually psychologists and social workers, watch videos of themselves and other clinicians working with parents and children to learn how to be more effective listeners. So, too, parents watch videos of themselves or other parents interacting with their children to recognize missed listening opportunities and the impact on family dynamics.
In a darkened and cramped seminar classroom at the New School in New York, I sat with several psychology graduate students who were watching videos of clinicians to learn the best practices of the Group Attachment-Based Intervention program, which is offered at six specially designed parent-child centers in New York City. Score sheets in hand, the graduate students were not only grading how well the clinicians in the videos listened but also how effective they were at getting parents to listen and attend to their children. The scoring system measured several dimensions of listening, including emotional awareness and body positioning.
In the first vignette, a clinician was seated with a mother and child at a low table in a roomful of squealing toddlers. One of the clinician’s arms was resting comfortably on the table and the other was on a chair back, creating an imaginary bubble encompassing both parent and child. The child was playing with Play-Doh, the mother was looking elsewhere, sighing and, at one point, even calling her child “weird” for playing make-believe. “Look,” the clinician said in a low voice, leaning closer toward the child and willing the child’s mother to follow. “She has an idea.” The mother suddenly looked at her toddler with interest. What was her little girl thinking?
When the lights went up, the grad students nodded at one another approvingly as if they had just watched an Olympic gymnast execute a difficult maneuver and land squarely on her feet. They gave the clinician in the video a near-perfect score and all but high-fived one another. It wasn’t clear to me why she was so exceptional until I watched videos of other clinicians. By comparison, they appeared stiff, more self-conscious, and more easily distracted. And while they chatted amiably enough with mothers or maybe played with the children and encouraged mothers to join in, what the clinician who scored like Simone Biles did was markedly different. She was exemplary not only for her calm demeanor, inclusive posture, and intent focus on both mother and child but also her deceptively simple observation: “She has an idea.” Which is another way of saying, “Let’s figure out what’s going on in your daughter’s head.”
It’s subtle, but profound. And it’s what listening is all about. Everybody has something going on in their heads, whether it’s your child, your romantic partner, your coworker, a client, or whoever. To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know. It’s what we all crave; to be understood as a person with thoughts, emotions, and intentions that are unique and valuable and deserving of attention.
Listening is not about teaching, shaping, critiquing, appraising, or showing how it should be done (“Here, let me show you.” “Don’t be shy.” “That’s awesome!” “Smile for Daddy.”). Listening is about the experience of being experienced. It’s when someone takes an interest in who you are and what you are doing. The lack of being known and accepted in this way leads to feelings of inadequacy and emptiness. What makes us feel most lonely and isolated in life is less often the result of a devastating traumatic event than the accumulation of occasions when nothing happened but something profitably could have. It’s the missed opportunity to connect when you weren’t listening or someone wasn’t really listening to you.
“What we’re after is a snatch of magic in the parent-child interaction, that moment of interest, attunement, and understanding, even if brief, that will stick in the minds of both parent and child, and might get them to notice and to listen later in another situation,” said Miriam Steele, professor of psychology and codirector of the Center for Attachment Research at the New School in New York, who has published studies on the effectiveness of the Group Attachment-Based Intervention program.
Those “snatches of magic” are what make life meaningful and what you see concretely in Uri Hasson’s fMRI scans of two brains in sync. It’s the measurable moment when, by listening, you connect with someone. Steele gave the example of another mother in the Group Attachment-Based Intervention program who said she couldn’t stand her baby’s crying. A well-meaning person might have explained that humans are designed to react negatively to babies crying so we’ll be moved to take care of them. Or maybe commiserated with the mother by saying, “Oh yeah, the sound of a baby crying can get to me, too.” But those responses would have earned you a low score on the listening scale used by the New School’s graduate students. The highest score, in fact, went to a clinician who didn’t tell the mother anything. She paused and asked, “What is it about the crying that bothers you?”
Why was this better? Because the mother thought for a moment and said it reminded her of crying when she was little and no one doing anything. Her child’s crying triggered a sort of post-traumatic stress. It made her fearful, resentful, and depressed. While the clinician and the young mother weren’t hooked up to an fMRI at that moment, it’s a good bet that if they had been, you would have seen their brain waves sync; that overlap of neural impulses that signals understanding and a significant relational shift. By listening first rather than jumping in prematurely to explain or reassure in a way that missed the point, the clinician was able to get on the mother’s wavelength so they could connect on a deeper level. And having experienced being experienced, the mother will hopefully be able to extend a similar gift to her child. It’s a model for how we could all listen better.
We are defined by our attachments in life, each relationship shaping how we are in the world and with one another. And these attachments come from listening to others, starting with our caregivers’ coos to soothe our distress, continuing into adulthood, work, marriage, and everyday life. Talking without listening is like touching without being touched. More encompassing than touch, our entire self vibrates with the sounds that are the expressed thoughts and feelings of another. The human voice enters and moves us physically as well as emotionally. It’s this resonance that allows us to understand and also to love. Evolution gave us eyelids so we can close our eyes but no corresponding structure to close off our ears. It suggests listening is essential to our survival.
3
Listening to Your Curiosity
What We Can Learn from Toddlers
Seated at a corner table in the bar at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C., Barry McManus scanned the room, taking in and taking the measure of everyone there. It’s a habit he developed during his twenty-six years working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. A trim African American with almond eyes, McManus could pass himself off for any number of nationalities—and, in fact, has.
We sat together, hunkered down in leather club chairs and camouflaged by a potted palm, after a very spy-like rendezvous at the Lincoln Memorial. I was on foot when the headlights of his Mercedes SUV pierced the mist and fog. McManus slowed down just long enough for me to get in, and we sped to Georgetown, where he made a swift U-turn across several lanes of traffic to deftly slide into an open parking space that seemed to be waiting for us in front of the hotel. I’m not making this up.
As the CIA’s chief interrogator and polygrapher, McManus worked in 140 countries interviewing terrorists, bomb makers, drug dealers, traitors, and other suspects. Lives depended on how well he listened. He retired in 2003 and now divides his time between teaching behavioral assessment at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and traveling the world doing security consulting. His clients are primarily foreign governments but also high-net-worth individuals who hire him to have what he calls “fireside chats” with prospective employees—particularly employees who will have close contac
t with the clients’ families, such as domestic staff, private doctors and nurses, the pilots who fly their jets, and the crews on their yachts. “A background check will only tell you what this person got caught doing in the past,” McManus said. “My job is to find out what the person didn’t get caught doing or might do in the future.”
While CIA agents are trained to be deceptive, manipulative, and even predatory in their quest for intelligence, what makes McManus effective is not some dark art. He simply gets a charge, almost a rush, out of listening to people who are different from him, even if (or maybe especially if) they have done very bad things. “Even if I don’t get anything from them, I learn the mind-set, the stance, the beliefs. How does he look? What does he think? What does he think of the West? What does he think of a guy like me? It’s a mind-blowing experience. It makes me better,” McManus said. “It’s your experiences in life that make you who you are. Even if you can’t get through to the suicide bomber, it helps you maybe get through to the guy later on, who is on the fringe or who is on the fence. You can relate to him after meeting the guy who took that wrong turn.”
McManus told me the CIA doesn’t so much train agents to be good listeners as recruit good listeners to be agents. The very best listeners get routed into interrogation and espionage while others might get assigned to work as, say, analysts or cyber warriors. It’s not surprising the agency would rather recruit than groom listeners because listening is more art than science. And the science that exists is pretty flimsy.
Listening is the neglected stepchild of communication research, pushed aside by investigations into effective elocution, rhetoric, argumentation, persuasion, and propaganda. Browse the three-volume, 2,048-page International Encyclopedia of Interpersonal Communication and you’ll find only one entry specific to listening. And you won’t even find listening in the index of The SAGE Handbook of Interpersonal Communication.