The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [28]
In the 1960s another experimenter, computer pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum, created Doctor, a software program that adapted a psychotherapy technique for bouncing back patients’ statements as questions:
User: I have been rather depressed lately.
Computer: Are you depressed often?
User: Yes, almost all the time.
Computer: Why do you say yes almost all the time?
User: Right now I feel like I could cry.
Computer: Is it because right now you feel like you could cry that you came to me?
One morning he was appalled to discover his transfixed secretary at a computer, unspooling her sorrows into Doctor’s clunky, copycat code.
I’m not shocked Weizenbaum was shocked (contrary as it seems, given that this confirmed his program’s success). Each of us swims in an amniotic consciousness, and we love, need, to feel understood, in order to dilute the solitude of our condition. So the thought that an echo is sufficient to convince us we’re being listened to, that the bogus Doctor could seduce the secretary, carries the degrading suggestion that much of human complexity—those worries and wonders we store up and long to share—may also be illusory, empty, and that we are mere bundles of reactions, mysterious, and meaningful only to us.
Such fears plague modern man, and to an extent explain the value vested in expert ear-givers—father confessors, therapists—who restore faith in empathy as an art akin to shriving the soul. And whose friendship we needn’t risk, troubles we needn’t take on in return: a relationship dead-end, compared to fruitful exchanges with friends. Consolingly private, but pretty barren, this seems a perfect manifestation of the depressing direction conversation is taking.
➺ Rule six: Good listeners share a virtue: imaginative hospitality
On the upside, Doctor’s success indicates how accessible are the basic tools of empathy. Nonetheless, for meaningful understanding, imaginative engagement helps.
Its qualities have been quantified in an “empathic communication coding system” designed to assess physicians’ listening, which placed greater value on showing than telling. From best to worst:
(I doubt this system advises British GPs to listen for a paltry average of three minutes before interrupting patients and telling them what is wrong.)
An open mind puts the censorious self on hold while a speaker speaks. In theory. In practice, since listening is a process of selection and creation, with our inner voice providing a running commentary, mind clearance is difficult.
To improve, try to notice how you listen. Do you hear people out? Or are you, like me, so eager to show empathy that you’re prone to talk over them?
And be aware of how you don’t listen. Detecting the message in what someone says—the motive, goal—is guesswork of an eye-blink, which lends it the false, often deafening power of instinct or intuition. Ralph Waldo Emerson caught the difficulty:
What you are sounds so loudly in my ears that I can’t hear what you say.
In conversation, as music, it is easier to hear a false note than identify its source. Our minds are astonishingly able at judging, creating rules of thumb, prejudices. Holding back—not immediately attributing our irritation to the other person’s character, but pausing to examine why we’re annoyed—serves us better.
➺ Rule seven: Trace the emotional line of expression
Superagent Mark McCormack urged aspiring tycoons:
Hear what people are really saying as opposed to what they are telling you.
Likewise, actress Harriet Walter advised would-be Cleopatras wrestling with Shakespeare’s verse to “hear the need” in a character’s speech—that is, find the emotional code to unlock its meaning.
Like arrows, words have impact through force and direction, but their point hits home only when listeners can account for where they are from and where they aim. And differences in conversational style add another “direction” that can, if misunderstood, lead to a personality clash. According to discourse