Bridging the Gap Between Hearing and Understanding

[Rough Transcript with Slides]

Before I start speaking, I’d like to ask everyone who has their laptops on their lap, ready to comment, to put them under their chair — preferably where you can’t see them, but at least at your feet. [Pause] Thank you.

So, I was on fall break just this past semester and I was rushing back because I was late for my bus, and I almost missed it, and while my mom and I were driving, weaving through heavy Boston traffic on a slightly icy road we started having a discussion. You know, that thing where I say what I want to say, and she says what she wants to say, and I say what I want to say a little bit louder, and she says what she wants to say a little bit louder, and I say what I want to say but it’s a little bit aggressive now, and she says what she wants to say but it’s sort of screaming, and… yeah, we were having a “discussion”. The discussion was about how I ought to vote on the upcoming midterm election. And I was confused, because as a lawyer and a good democratic citizen she should have understood that this was my decision to make — I needed to be autonomous in this decision — and so, as any good college student would do, I enumerated a long list of well thought out points as to why I ought to make this decision by myself. But I was still confused, and pissed, as I got on the bus later because it seemed that she had ignored all of my points. Why hadn’t she heard, why hadn’t she understood? Well, after doing a little bit of research I realized that this matter was less about hearing, and the auditory functions of a human, but more about understanding — the way we form memories and learn.

Here is a very basic memory model [motioning at slide]. Now, the memory model is important to understanding because all learning is, really, is memory. What happens in memory is that we take information in our present — stimuli that we are currently receiving — and we store it in a way that helps with future events. Right here [motioning at slide] we have “Event” to “Working Memory” to “Long-Term Memory”, and although it’s laid out very linearly on the slide I’m showing you now, it’s anything but that. Every time you see an arrow on that slide there’s a chance to lose information, making it harder to get from the event to the long-term memory that can help us to understand another person.

Now let’s focus on working memory. Working memory is the way we take in stimuli that are coming in at the current moment. As you might imagine, it’s incredibly overwhelming. We have to process all of our senses coming in at the very same moment, and so working memory actually has a very limited capacity. If you want to repeat back something that was just said to you, you have about three or four seconds to do so. So if a teacher or parent says “What did I just say?!” you have about three or four seconds to repeat it verbatim and if not it’s gone. That’s the capacity of our auditory working memory, and the problem with that is that it’s obviously very limited and prone to distraction. Our working memory has a solution to this: it allows us to focus in on things that are really important to us, and oftentimes this process is much more automatic then we think, and oftentimes it’s a good process. So, for example, if I’m standing in a very crowded room, like a party, and I hear my friend call my name from across the room, I can turn to them and focus in on them. This is great, because now I’ve found my friend, but what if I’m walking towards them and I bump into another person? It’s not because I couldn’t see the person, I was simply so focused on my friend and my attention was there, so the person didn’t register in my visual field. And this is exactly the problem with working memory: it is so prone to distraction. In the case of listening and understanding there was a recent study that shows that if a phone is placed, even face down, between two people who are conversing the conversation holds less meaning and less empathetic connection. And this, in this context, makes a lot of sense — our working memory can only deal with so much incoming information at one time, and if we are always thinking “I wonder if I missed a text or a phone call” then that’s a moment when you’re not focusing on what the other person is saying. And the problem is that working memory is like the gate to all memories — if it never gets encoded into working memory it’s gone. We cannot put it into long-term memory without it first going here. So, the concerned listener’s responsibility, in the case of working memory, is to limit the distractions between them and the person speaking.

Now, before we move on to long-term memory, I want to explain how one would get from working memory to long-term memory. It’s a process called “semantic processing,” and it means assigning meaning to incoming stimuli, building it into our neural associations that already exist. To explain what an association is, I’m going to have you look at this picture:

As Vermont college students, I’m sure you all know what this is — this is a cow. And, if I were to ask you, then, what a cow drinks I’m sure you all would have a very intelligent answer. Now, eventually, I’m sure you all came around to the conclusion that cows do, in fact, drink water, but somewhere in your brain there was probably a little part of you that said, “Milk. They drink milk.” Why is this? Because we have very ingrained associations. When you hear “cow” and “drink” you think “milk.” Why? Because you’ve been told all your life that the drink that comes from a cow is milk. And this is usually very helpful to you. You wouldn’t want to go into the dining hall and tap your friend on the shoulder and say, “Hey… Do you know where that cow drink thing is?” It’s very helpful to be able to say “milk,” but this is also a problem because, as this example illustrates, our associations are not always helpful and not always correct. In the context of listening and understanding, there has been a recent study that shows that this can extend to moral issues, making it harder for us to internalize what we don’t already expect. For example, if I were a devout Christian with a very conservative belief system, a pro-lifer for my entire existence, then hearing the sentence “A society that condones abortion is a good society” would give me pause, specifically at the word “good.” What the study found is that when people reach the word “good” in that sentence, if it is a value-incongruent word — as it would be for a person who is pro-life — they will have a characteristic neural spike directly before, during, and after the value-incongruent word. This tells us two things: first, it tells us humans make evaluations pretty much instantaneously — right in the middle of the sentence. They don’t wait to hear the whole point. Secondly, our evaluations are much harder when we reach something that we don’t understand or already expect. So if we don’t already believe something in a sentence, we are less likely to get to the point where we can understand it, or at least, it is very difficult for us. This, actually, can be very easily solved by summarizing and asking clarifying questions. During any conversation you can ask a speaker to pause for a second and you can repeat back to them what they were saying and ask them clarifying questions to give yourself two chances to process and to make sure that you’ve actually caught what they were trying to say.

Now, at this point in my talk I could tell you to use all of the information I have just given you to be a better listener. Great. You’ve probably been told that all of your life. Your teachers have told you that, your parents have told you that, you’ve probably told yourself that. You’ve wanted to be a better listener. It would be great for you to be a better listener. But, let’s be honest, being a better listener is tough. My whole talk has proved that. But I’m here to tell you that it’s not so bad, because communication is a two-way street.

Do you see it? [Pause]

There’s a chasm between me and you, but that chasm can be bridged in both directions. Instead of just focusing on being the concerned listener might we also want to focus on being the concerned speaker? Together, doing things just like asking you to take your laptops off your lap at the beginning of the speech, both of us can, from both directions, bridge the gap between hearing and understanding.

Thank you.

References

5 Ways to Listen Better. Performance by Julian Treasure, TedTalks, 2011.

Jacobs, Tom. “Even Just the Presence of a Smartphone Lowers the Quality of In-Person Conversations.” Pacific Standard, 14 July 2014, psmag.com/ social-justice/presence-smart-phone-lowers-quality-person-conversations-85805.

Myers, David G., and Nathanial C. DeWall. Psychology. Eleventh ed., Worth Publishers, 2015.

Sensory Memory. PsycholoGenie, 10 Feb. 2018, psychologenie.com/
understanding-difference-between-iconic-memory-echoic-memory.

Rogers, Chad S. “Semantic Priming, Not Repetition Priming, is to Blame for False Hearing.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 24, no. 4, 2017, ProQuest, http://ezproxy.middlebury.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1935794587?accountid=12447,

Strauss, Daniel J., and Alexander L. Francis. “Toward a Taxonomic Model of Attention in Effortful Listening.” Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience, vol. 17, no. 4, 2017, ProQuest, http://ezproxy.middlebury.edu/loginurl=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1929403586?accountid=12447,

Van Berkum, Jos J.A., et al. “Right or Wrong? The Brain’s Fast Response to Morally Objectionable Statements.” Psychological Science, vol. 20, no. 9, 2009, pp. 1092–1099. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40575149

Working Memory. Examined Existance, examinedexistence.com/
what-is-working-memory-in-the-human-brain/.