The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [26]
Attention-deficit disorder, formerly known as annoying brat syndrome, is a clumsy term for a pervasive social blight: bad listening. I don’t just mean those trying, shouty kids who hear nothing at the word “No” but an instruction to turn up the volume. However, they’re a poignant illustration of what becomes of people who don’t acquire, for whatever reason, the raft of facilities that we compact under the term “listening,” skills that children saw more of in less distracted times, but which are today increasingly scarce—whether in classrooms, pubs, clubs, or at dinner parties.
Can we improve?
You might think, why try? Are we not doomed, set from the crib to our happy or unhappy parent’s wavelength? Indeed, because we learn to listen before we speak, analyzing it feels odd. But it isn’t impossible, and it’s worth it. Throughout life, listening makes us articulate, creating knowledge, attuning us to others’ rhythm, helping us feel good. Like every aspect of conversation, it can be done better. Or worse.
In theory, it consists of two skills:
Projection: displaying listening
Detection: interpreting meaning and sentiment
In practice, detection breaks down to six tasks:
Hearing messages
Understanding
Remembering
Interpreting
Evaluating
Responding
But six is too modest a number. Words’ melody maps the emotional curve of meaning, and as those who suffer from autism find, without sentimental equipment—what Jane Austen termed sensibility—following conversation is tough. So nimble listeners leaf through a mille-feuille of different messages: not only assessing context and sense, but gleaning speakers’ motivation, personality, agenda, mood, indigestion, sobriety . . .
That is, listening is harder than reading runes. Yet, by adulthood, most of our interpretative software is such that a study of people listening to football results found that
as soon as the name of the second team is read out, you know straight away what the result is [win/lose/draw], even though you haven’t heard the score yet.
In another, from recordings of “forty seconds of surgeon-patient consultations” in which words had been wiped, leaving only tone, listeners could deduce which surgeons had been sued for malpractice. Surprise, surprise, they were the ones who sounded overbearing, not sympathetic. The moral of the story is that listening binds people to us.
➺ Rule three: Listening is the mother of invention: we make it up as we go along
Although we might imagine we hang off a person’s every word, this is a trick of our con-artist minds.
Three factors make listening creative, setting aside the not inconsiderable matter of weighing up the myriad meanings in every utterance. First, memory forms, as Plato observed, on a warm wax slab. Most messages self-destruct within half a minute, conversation following a thirty-second short-term memory track, which is built and dismantled as fast as its engine moves. So we lose the thread, or as actress Ronni Ancona apologized for a tangent:
My train of thought fell into my stream of consciousness.
Second, listening is selective: We zone in on a voice, even if others in the vicinity are louder, in what linguists dub the “cocktail-party effect.” Third, however much we might wish to, we cannot hear everything. Expert Jean Aitchison explained:
[If we] assume an average of four sounds per English word, and a speed of five words a second, we are expecting the ear and brain to cope with around twenty sounds a second. But humans cannot process this number of signals in that time.
Like inattentive yet imaginative secretaries taking dictation, our Houdini brains don’t absorb every unit of each word but surf sound, improvising, glossing, and predicting. Such feats show how listening elasticates our minds, springing us to conclusions with a gymnast’s grace. Is it any wonder that occasionally we slip, detecting words on the tip of another’s tongue, and bite back before they have spoken?
➺ Rule four: We’re boundless adepts at