The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [25]
Rather gorier propaganda took place in Japan in 1597, with the erection of the Mimizuka or “Mound of Ears” outside Kyoto. This grim shrine contains ears and noses of up to forty thousand Korean victims of overlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s territory grabs into Korea and China (1592-98)—an obfuscation that couldn’t mask his ventures’ ultimate failure.
Martial madness turned silly in 1739, when Spain and Britain began what the latter dubbed the War of Jenkins’s Ear, named for a British captive who lost his to a Spanish privateer’s blade in 1731. It was handed back with the words, allegedly,
“Take this to your king and tell him if he were here I would do the same to him.”
Instead, seven years later, Jenkins flourished the wizened item before Parliament, demanding retribution, and the conflict raged for nine wretched years. But this noble revenge story masked the war’s somewhat ignoble origin in a squabble over Florida colonies.
In the last century, the ear became a source of horror, figuring disconnection and alienation—whether in the lobe that crazed Vincent van Gogh lopped off as a love token, the severed ear that besoils a white-picket-fence world in the film Blue Velvet , or the one sliced off a cop taken hostage in Reservoir Dogs.
THE DYNAMISM OF LISTENING
As art forms go, listening is a real Cinderella, little studied, scarcely taught. Yet there is no doubt it activates intelligence: Infants snatch up words, with a vocabulary of up to five thousand by their fourth year, largely spoken grammatically, whereas deaf children unschooled in sign language or lipreading are severely mentally impaired. Are these dynamic skills, found in no other species, acquired simply by hanging around?
Not a chance. The opposite of passive, listening is an activity and it wires the minds of those of us who are lucky enough to be wired for sound.
➺ Rule two: Listening is the mother of relating
Feedback is neither silent nor invisible. It precedes talk and is first evoked by baby talk, what speech professionals call “motherese.” Although baby talk may sound like nonsense, it is instinctive and universal. Studies have found even premature infants automatically play goo-goo games with parents, and by four months they chime in to nursery rhymes, and, giggling, will mess with the beat—in effect, cracking musical jokes. Parents are no less programmed than their sprogs; as a child develops, baby talk unfolds in remarkably similar patterns across the globe, whatever the glottal idiosyncrasies of the parents’ mother tongue.
In essence, it’s a foundation course in the wind instrument, the voice, which is far and away the most complex sound system we can hear in nature. When the adult voice lifts and dips, roaming around inside and elongating vowels (consonants, the percussion section, are taught later), the exaggerations of pitch and tone sculpt points for the infant’s untrained auditory cortex to seize hold of, educating it in how to differentiate sounds, and later words, from the voicestream.
The importance of baby talk to malleable young minds is evident in the case of so-called wild children, who, having grown up without human contact for the first several years of their lives, never learn to speak. But more than language, when the infant gurgles back to the parent, the two are duetting. Such musical companionship informs and enriches intellectually and emotionally, grounding babies in taking turns and timing: the key to social harmony.
By contrast, if babies are understimulated, they suffer. Depressed mothers’ infants, who tend to experience lower pitched, less frequent vocalizations, are relatively flat, and clumsier at joining in, taking turns—negative feedback that gives their mothers less to grab on to, weakening the parental bond further. It would be wrong to accuse the poor mums of passing depression on. Rather, insufficiently turned