by Kate Murphy
You can also have earplugs custom made to fit your ears’ unique pinnae for $40–$200. The higher-priced versions have noise-filtering systems built in, which allow you to hear clearly but at reduced volume. These kinds of plugs are often used by people who have noisy professions, such as musicians, pilots, dentists, factory workers, and computer technicians. But noise-filtering plugs are not a bad investment for anyone who wants to go to a movie or music concert without damaging their ears. If you download a noise meter app onto your phone, you’ll find that the sound level during many movies far exceeds the upper limit recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
Experts have begun referring to teenagers today as “Generation Deaf” because near chronic earbud or headphone use is ruining their hearing. The World Health Organization has warned that 1.1 billion young people are at risk of hearing loss because of earbud abuse. A good way to tell if kids are damaging their hearing is if you can hear any noise emanating from the earbuds or headphones they are wearing. The volume is at a safe level if you can’t hear anything. But of course, it’s not just young people. Adults, too, routinely crank up the volume on their phones to drown out ambient noise, or because the connection is bad.
Fifteen percent of Americans, around 48 million people, have hearing loss. Sixty-five percent of them are under age sixty-five. As a result, hearing loss is viewed as a major public health issue, ranking as the third most common chronic physical condition after high blood pressure and arthritis.
Many people aren’t aware that they are losing their hearing until it’s severe. This is because when you have light to moderate hearing loss, your brain takes up the slack by filling in the words you don’t hear in conversations. The problem is that your brain is not always accurate. In fact, it often isn’t. Your brain goes with what it expects to hear rather than what is actually said or sometimes hears things when nothing is said at all. As far back as the 1890s, researchers have demonstrated humans’ susceptibility to auditory hallucinations by pairing a tone with some sort of stimulus, such as a pulse of light. Before long, subjects start to “hear” the tone when only the light flashes. You’ve probably experienced a similar phenomenon when you hear your cell phone ring, ping, or burble when it hasn’t.
Before he died, the neurologist Oliver Sacks kept a notebook of his “mishearings” when his own hearing was failing. He wrote what he misheard in red, what was really said in green, and in purple, he recorded the resulting misunderstandings, some worthy of a sitcom episode. They included him hearing “choir practice” instead of “chiropractor” and “cuttlefish” instead of “publicist.” My personal favorite example of a mishearing was when I told a friend I was growing baby seedless watermelons in my garden and he said, “Baby Jesus watermelons? Do you have to grow them in a manger?”
A common form of mishearing happens when we’re unable to make out the lyrics of songs and our brains substitute something that makes some sort of sense. A classic example is hearing “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy,” in Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” instead of “’Scuse me while I kiss the sky.” The phenomenon even has a name: mondegreen. American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, describing how as a girl she misheard the lyric “—and laid him on the green” in a Scottish ballad as “—and Lady Mondegreen.”
Mishearings are also sometimes due to the McGurk effect, which occurs when people get conflicting visual and auditory stimuli. For example, if the syllables ba-ba are spoken over the lip movements of ga-ga, our perception is da-da.
The lesson in all this is that many people may be poor listeners because they truly can’t hear well and their brains are working in strange ways to make up for it. While some mishearings can be humorous, hearing loss, in the long run, leads to a litany of poor emotional and social outcomes, including, but not limited to:
irritability, negativism, anger, fatigue, tension, stress, and depression
avoidance or withdrawal from social situations
social rejection and loneliness
reduced job performance and earning power
diminished psychological and overall health
These symptoms are not so much the result of hearing loss per se but the resulting inability to connect with people. So it’s enormously important to protect your hearing by keeping volume on sound systems in a safe range (no more than 60 percent of maximum volume) and wearing earplugs when in noisy environments. It’s also a good idea to get your ears checked if you suspect your listening problems have a physiological component. Earwax buildup all by itself can cause hearing loss. You’d be surprised how a good ear cleaning once or twice a year by an otolaryngologist can improve your hearing.
* * *
While our ears are obviously essential to hearing, it’s worth noting that listening is as much a visual as aural enterprise. It’s probably not by accident that Wernicke’s area, where speech is processed in the brain, is located at the juncture of the visual and auditory cortices. During perfectly audible conversations, lipreading is responsible for as much as 20 percent of your comprehension. Moreover, it’s widely thought that at least 55 percent of the emotional content of a spoken message is, in fact, transmitted nonverbally. So, even if you’ve had your ears checked and your hearing is perfect, if you are looking at your phone or out the window while someone is talking to you, you’re not getting the whole story.
As much as we like to think we can control how much we reveal, our facial expressions, respiration, perspiration, gestures, posture, and numerous other types of body language usually give us away. As Sigmund Freud said, “No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” Good listeners pick up on the subtle signals others miss.
There are universal facial expressions people make when feeling authentic emotion. Among the most obvious are the furrowed brow, pursed lips, and raised chin of wounded pride and the soft wrinkling around the eyes and open, upturned mouth of genuine delight. We share many spontaneous facial expressions (smiling, grimacing, raising your eyebrows in surprise) with primates, which suggests our facial expressions are an involuntary pre-language.
Charles Darwin believed that the ability to communicate, “Danger!” or “Don’t mess with me!” or “Let’s mate!” was key to human survival long before we developed the ability to talk. Researchers have measured the rate at which people’s facial muscles contract to form expressions and found that they occur in conjunction with, and at the same frequency as, spoken or signed words in a sentence. It’s called the grammaticalization of facial expressions.
Expressions of authentic emotion are discernibly different from those people “put on.” They are a special combination of minute muscle contractions, particularly around the eyes and mouth, over which you have no control. You can fake a smile, put on a brave face, and feign surprise, but it’s not going to look the same as it would if you actually felt the emotions.
People tend to be pretty good at telling when someone is putting on a fake face as well as reading people’s real emotions, provided they have experience. People who were raised by, say, emotionally flat parents or parents who were depressed or angry all the time tend to have trouble reading the full range of facial expressions. Studies have shown this is also true for people who spend too much time looking at screens.
But the effects are reversible if one seizes opportunities to listen and engage with a wide variety of people. For example, in one study of children at a device-free outdoor camp, researchers found that after just five days without phones or tablets and interacting with their peers, the kids were able to accurately read facial expressions and identify the emotions of people in photographs and videotaped scenes significantly better than controls who had not attended the camp and continued using their devices.
The face not only changes its expression in response to emotion, it also changes color. Not just beet red
with embarrassment and ghostly white from shock but more subtle shades corresponding to a range of emotions. The changes occur due to slight shifts in blood flow around the nose, eyebrows, cheeks, and chin. Moreover, the color patterns, or color ratios, indicating different emotions are the same regardless of gender, ethnicity, or overall skin tone. Attentive listeners perceive those shifts, usually subconsciously.
Researchers at Ohio State University superimposed the color signatures of various emotions on neutral faces and subjects were able to accurately tell what the person was feeling up to 74 percent of the time. Our faces have more blood vessels close to the surface of the skin than just about anywhere else in the body. That, along with the fact that we have less facial hair than apes, suggests there is an evolutionary advantage to showing our true colors. But you won’t perceive it if you aren’t listening using all your senses.
You get a flood of signals when you listen to someone, many outside of your conscious awareness, but nevertheless, informing your impression of the person and interpretation of the message. Sometimes, though, all that incoming information can get overwhelming, particularly when the subject of the conversation is intense. It’s why people sometimes, without realizing it, attempt to dial it back by, for example, bringing up emotional topics while driving, cooking, or doing some other task where they won’t have to look at the other person straight on. Likewise, romantic partners might have serious talks while they are lying side by side in a darkened bedroom. The lessening or softening of visual cues keeps them from going into sensory overload.
Many journalists, including Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, prefer telephone to in-person interviews so they don’t get biased or distracted by the other person’s appearance or nonverbal tics. They may also not want to inadvertently influence the other person with their own body language or unsettle them by taking notes or consulting notes they’d taken in preparation for the interview. It’s the same idea behind the confessional booth in the Roman Catholic Church, where a screen divides priest and penitent so there’s nothing but the words passing between them. It can make people less self-conscious and encourage a more open and honest exchange.
It’s a balance, though, between what you lose and what you gain by listening blind. Because nonverbal signals typically carry more than half, or 55 percent, of the emotional content of a message, if you take them out of the equation, you’re missing out on a lot of information. But on occasions when nonverbal indicators would get in the way of the articulation of the message or affect how accurately the message is interpreted, you need to take that into account.
If you have to listen to someone remotely, phone is better than text or email because as much as 38 percent of someone’s feelings and attitudes are conveyed by tone of voice. This means that during many conversations, you get just 7 percent of the meaning from the actual words, which could be typed. Recall that the way someone says sure can indicate whether that person is eager, ambivalent, or resistant to help with a request. Font styles notwithstanding, the word sure always looks the same on a screen.
Of course, picking up on intonations during a phone call depends on a decent connection, which is getting harder to come by. Terry Gross has the advantage of talking to people on an integrated services digital network, or ISDN, line which gives her exceptionally high-quality audio. But for those placing calls on mobile phones, the distortions, delays, and breaks make it harder to pick up on the nuances in tone that enhance understanding.
Jerry Gibson, an electrical engineer and distinguished professor at the University of California–Santa Barbara, told me one of the reasons why it’s so hard to have a decent cell phone conversation is because voice calls are a low priority for service providers. There is higher demand for video and data, he said, so wireless providers have gotten stingy on the bandwidth, or bit rates, they allot for voice calls. The result is poor sound quality but fewer interruptions in service.
“Their calculation is you will be less frustrated by a bad connection than a dropped connection,” said Gibson, who is an expert in mobile communication technology and author of several books on the subject with titles like Information Theory and Rate Distortion Theory for Communications and Compression. In other words, there are technological reasons contributing to your disinclination to talk on the phone. “You get low enough bandwidth and the call is tinny, breaks in and out, and doesn’t sound very good,” Gibson said. “It’s no wonder people would rather text.”
While the technology used to digitally transmit the human voice between mobile phones is complicated, it’s nothing compared to the complexity of how human beings perceive speech, process it, and ultimately derive meaning. Science still hasn’t figured it all out. But what is known is listening is intricate and multisensory. We also know the mechanics of listening—the structures within our ears—are fragile and should be protected. And finally, and most reassuringly, we know that our listening ability, measured by the accuracy of our understanding, is improvable with motivation and practice.
14
Addicted to Distraction
There was a time when, during idle or anxious moments, people reached for a cigarette. They lit up while fretting over a problem, drinking a cup of coffee, waiting on a friend, driving a car, mingling at a party, and unwinding after sex. Now, in those same situations, people just as reflexively reach for their phones. Like smokers nervously patting their pockets for cigarettes, people get jittery without their phones. Indeed, mental health experts say device dependency has many of the same behavioral, psychological, and neurobiological components as substance abuse.
While our smartphones may not allow us to have a decent conversation (“Can you hear me now? How about now?”), they seem to offer us just about everything else—social media, games, news, maps, recipes, videos, music, movies, podcasts, shopping, and pornography, if you’re so inclined. In the end, none of it is as emotionally satisfying or as essential to our well-being as connecting with a live human being. And yet, like any addict, we keep tapping, scrolling, and swiping as if pulling a lever on a slot machine, hoping to eventually hit the jackpot.
This compulsion, driven by a fear of missing out, prevents sustained attention, making listening—or any task requiring thought—difficult. It’s hard to concentrate on what’s happening in the real world when you’re preoccupied with what could be happening in the virtual one. Experts have raised concerns that we are even losing our ability to daydream, as fantasizing, too, requires some level of attention. Many of the greatest advances in science and arts and letters have come by way of daydreaming. Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, T. S. Eliot, and Lewis Carroll all attributed their genius to long periods of uninterrupted musing. Could you put away your phone for an hour? A half hour? Five minutes?
Research conducted by Microsoft found that since the year 2000, the average attention span dropped from twelve to eight seconds. For context, a goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds, according to the report. While journalists, psychologists, and neuroscientists have since quibbled with how one measures attention (of a human or a goldfish) and whether it’s really a declining ability or simply more divided, advertisers and media companies are living with the reality that it’s harder than ever to capture people’s attention.
It’s why The New York Times online now has daily briefings of a couple of sentences accompanied by lively visuals, video, and animated graphics, replacing the previous paragraph-long teasers of top stories that were standard a decade ago. Experts in web analytics say the majority of internet users give articles online about fifteen seconds before deciding to stay or go, and if a website takes more than three seconds to load, people get utterly exasperated and move on. A study by a British advertising buyer found that, on average, when people are at home, they switch between devices (phone, tablet, or laptop) twenty-one times per hour, all while the television is on in the background. So if you’re still reading this book so many pages in, I’m ecstatic.
Comedy skits performed onstage at Second City in Chicago have gone from fifteen minutes to five minutes. Acutely aware of their audiences’ diminished attention spans, directors told me they have to keep the action moving at a rapid clip as well as provide more active (moving, flashing, rotating) lighting. There is no thought of letting a joke slowly build to a big payoff. Directors and performers said people would be checking their phones before actors could arrive at the punch line.
Websites, mobile apps, video games, and social media platforms are designed to grab and keep your attention. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Epic Games (the creator of the popular third-person-shooter video game Fortnite) comingle computer science, neuroscience, and psychology to develop strategies to hook you, often by playing on your social anxieties, vanity, and greed. They do it because your taps, swipes, scrolls, and clicks are how they make money. Like it or not, we are participating in an attention economy, where advertisers pay billions to media companies to steal us away from whatever else we might want to focus on. Attention has become a commodity, bought and sold on sophisticated electronic exchanges where bidding occurs in real time based on data provided by your cell phone or web browser. The quality of your attention doesn’t matter. Indeed, the more divided your attention, the more persuadable you are. The more likely you are to click Buy Now.
Our human brains are not equipped to manage the onslaught. A stay-at-home mom in Boise, Idaho, told me, “It used to be you just knew the narratives of the people in your immediate world, but now it’s the universe, with updates every minute. Things are pushed on us. There are constant, urgent interruptions. What did President Trump do now? A typhoon in Asia killed how many people? I feel like I’m always being buffeted about. You feel busier trying to keep up, but it just keeps you from getting anything done.”