Conscious Listening - Julian Treasure at TEDxDanubia

Julian Treasure studies sound and advises businesses on how best to use it. He wrote the book "Sound Business", a complete introduction to harnessing the power of sound in business, from branding and marketing to the telephone, the web and physical spaces such as shops, restaurants, offices and reception areas.

I would like to invite you to listen

for the next few minutes, but perhaps

in some ways you've never listened before.

We have 4 communication skills in fact,

two outputs and two inputs.

And if you ask people in research

which one is the most important,

the vast majority of people say

that the most important one is listening.

If you ask a great salesperson

what's more important in your sales conversation,

is it speaking or listening,

that's the answer they'll give you.

In fact we spend up to 60 %

of our communication time listening.

Depending on the job we do, and what we do,

in our families and so forth.

And yet, we're not very good at it.

Our listening comprehension is just 25%.

Which means that 3 words in 4
that are spoken to us

just disappear.

I'm not talking about you, not this talk,

but in general.

So what is listening?
Have you ever thought

about a definition of listening?

We take it for granted.

I'd like to offer you a very broad definition
of the word 'listening.'

And I'm not talking here just about
listening to somebody speaking,

I'm talking about listening
to the whole world around you.

My definition of listening is
making meaning from sound.

All the sound around us.

This is the process that I'm going
to describe to you now,

and there are 3 stages to that process.

The first stage is a physical stage:

sound waves hit your body.

All over, you listen with your whole body,

but in particular, they go deep inside your head,

and the sound waves touch your eardrums.

This is a very intimate sense:

deep inside your head,
you're being touched,

all the time, by sound.

In the second stage,

that physical relationship
is translated into neural activity,

electrical activity in the brain,

and we've just been hearing a great deal

about the wonders of what goes on inside our skulls.

In the third part of the process,

mental activity takes place and that,

I suggest, is when listening really happens.

The first two parts of that process
are really about hearing.

So let's have a look at
the mental side of the process.

We use some good tricks
in order to make sense,

in order to make meaning out of sound.

One of the most important tricks
is pattern recognition:

your name is the pattern
that you’re most attuned to.

But all of us have had the experience
of standing in a room -- (ambient noise)

where there's a cocktail party going on.

And fighting to understand
exactly what's being said,

trying to extract signal from noise.

That gets tougher as you get older.

It's called the cocktail party effect.

And I don't like going to parties
so much like that anymore

because I do find it very hard
to hear what is being said.

The second trick that we use in order to
extract meaning from sound,

is differencing.

If I were to play this sound -- (pink noise)

and leave it on for a few minutes,
this is pink noise,

it's a very flat-spectrum sound.

If I left that on for a few minutes,
you would actually cease to hear it.

When there's a constant sound,
our brains just suppress it

and we cease to be conscious of it.

That sound is used in offices all over the world

to cover up bad sounds
and people just aren't aware of it,

until it stops of course.

And the third trick that we use,

or the third system that we use to extract meaning

is a whole set of filters.
Now these are important

and I just want to give you a list of those filters

so you perhaps become
more conscious of them in your listening.

It starts with culture:
where you come from affects your listening.

For example, I love the Finns,

the Finns have a whole different relationship
with silence to most cultures that I know.

Their idea of a good night out
is to go to somebody's house,

sit for 3 hours in silence,
and then go home.

Finland is a very quiet place.

Then we have language,
the language you speak changes your listening.

These are filters which cut down
the sound that's bombarding us

and just leave us with the bit we're conscious of.

So for example in Sub-Saharan Africa,

some languages use just finality

to distinguish present, future, past,

and to distinguish even good and bad.

They don't have words for that,
it's just the tone of voice.

The values you hold,
your beliefs about what's going on around you,

and then of course your expectations,
your attitudes going into

a relationship with somebody for example

and very much your expectations
will change your listening for that person.

And in fact, this is something to be very conscious of,

because as our expectations about a person solidify,

our listening for that person ossifies,
it becomes fixed.

And we take away that permission to change.

So we don't hear the stuff they do or say
that's different from what we're expecting,

we only hear what we're expecting.

And that's something to be very conscious of
in a relationship.

When I met my wife who's sitting down there,

I promised her, "I will listen to you
as if for the first time,

everyday." Now I fall short of that very often,

but it's a good commitment.

I'm trying to be conscious all the time

and give her permission to be different.

And your intention is crucial with sound.

I'm gonna talk about that
a little bit more in a moment.

And just in case you still think
that what you hear is what you get,

I'm going to give you some examples
of cross-modal effects,

that is one sense affecting another.

This is an illusion, a well-known illusion,
called the McGurk effect,

I'd like to thank Professor Arnt Maasø
for this example,

what I would like you to do is to look at the screen,

and tell me what this guy is saying.

Man: Da da da da da da

Man: Da da da da da da --
JT: Da da, yes?

Now I would like you to close your eyes,
and tell me what he's saying.

Man: Ba ba, ba ba, ba ba.

JT: He's saying Ba ba.

Now open your eyes again
and you'll hear "da da."

You cannot counter this effect.

Man: Ba Ba

JT: So what you hear is not necessarily
always the truth.

What is the truth?
It's interpretive.

There's another well known illusion,

which is that sound
-- it's not an illusion, it's an effect --

which is that sound can affect
other senses like taste,

this is researched by Professor Charles Spence
at Oxford University,

who found that if you put headphones on people

and boost the frequency 5 kHz,

they actually relate that the crisps they're eating

are 15 % crunchier in their mouth,

because the sound of crunch has gone up,
the feeling of crunch goes up.

So the senses are affecting each other all the time.

But we have a problem.

The problem is we simply don't listen.

And I'd like to suggest to you that
that is a very significant problem.

There are reasons for this problem,

thousands of years ago we invented writing,

before that, if you didn't listen, if you missed it,

you missed it.

Now, well if you want to go to sleep,

in this talk, you can watch it
on the TEDx Youtube channel afterwards.

The premium on being present
and listening is not as great as it used to be.

That's the first reason.

Secondly, I would suggest there's
a cultural thing going on here as well:

you may be familiar with the Chinese model
that the duality of yin and yang,

where yang is heat and light
and sun and male energy

and much outward focused,

and yin is dark, moon, female energy,
receiving, much quieter.

Well if I substitute sound words for those two,

I think you might agree with me that in our culture,

we're much more fond of telling,
than we are of listening.

And that creates a world that looks like this,

and sounds like this:

(indistinct conversation noises)

People telling, telling, telling, all the time.

And it's not surprising therefore,

that many people take refuge in this:

(earphones displayed on the picture
while music playing faintly)

But there's an effect of that,
a social effect of that,

on the way that we are with each other.

We take a public space,
imagine any big public space

it could be this theater, I hope not,

I hope nobody's wearing
headphones at the moment,

but a train station, an airport, a train carriage,

whatever space where we're with other people.

We take that space, where for a long time

we've been listening to each other.

We might not be speaking to each other,

but we're conscious of each other in our listening.

but we're conscious of each other in our listening.

And we are turning that space into this.

Thousands if millions of little sound bubbles.

They're called personal soundscapes,

and this fragmentation of public
and shared soundscape

into personal soundscapes
has got serious consequences

because in this scenario,
we're not listening to each other at all.

We are also becoming short of patience.

We don't want to listen to oratory,

we want soundbites.

We don't watch TV programs,
we channel-hop.

We don't listen to albums,
we listen to tracks.

We don't want to have conversations,

we want to tweet or text.

So our patience is getting shorter and shorter.

And at the same time we're becoming
desensitized in our listening.

Our media have to shout at us

in order for us to hear.

And this level of desensitization
means that we're finding it

harder and harder to hear the quiet,

the subtle, the silence.

We are losing our listening in the modern world.

And I think this is a message
you're going to receive several times today

in one form or another.
How can we get it back?

Well I'd like to give you some exercises
to take away with you,

these are kind of like being in the gym,

the first one of these is this:

(Silence)

Silence is very rare in the modern world.

I urge you to seek it out,

and just give yourself
a few minutes of silence every day.

It re-calibrates, it resets your ears,

it's like a sorbet in a good meal.

It allows you to hear again

freshly as if for the first time.

That's the first one.

The second one is a process I call 'the Mixer',

where you can go into
any noisy modern environment like this,

(Noise)

Familiar?

and start to think:
"How many channels of sound am I hearing?"

How many separate sound sources?
How many people's voices,

chairs squeaking, barristers banging?

You can do this in beautiful natural surroundings
like this as well

(water sounds and chirping birds)

How many birds can I hear?
The wind in the trees,

How many separate ripples?

It's a great exercise to improve
the acuity of your listening.

The third exercise is savoring.

Like this guy savoring his cup of coffee,

even the most mundane sounds around us,

you can savor, if you really pay attention to them.

This -- (engine noise) -- is my tumble drier,

I recorded it before I came out.

It's a waltz! One two three,
one two three, one two three.

That's quite groovy!
I could put music on top of that!

Or take another simple domestic sound
like boiling a kettle.

(Noise)

Wow!

So you can really savor even the simplest sounds.

The next exercise is listening positions:

have you ever thought of the idea
that you could take up

certain positions to listen from?

This can change everything.

I'm going to give you 6 and I'm positioning them as

ends of the spectrum --

This is arbitrary, there are lots of listening positions,

and I do urge you to explore your own --

So here are the 6 I'm gonna give you,

The first is active listening.

This is used in the caring professions
a great deal of the time.

What I hear you say is -- What you said is --

So I hear you say this.

This allows the person talking to feel heard.

And it's used in education, therapy,
counseling and so forth.

Very powerful in parenting.

Second: passive listening.
The other end of that scale,

this would be the zen master
sitting by the bank of a brook

just listening to the water.

No interpretation, no mental activity at all,

just receiving.

Two more for you.

Critical listening.

This is what you and I do most of the time.

Is that right or wrong?

Do I agree or do I disagree?

You’re probably doing it now.

It's a very interpretive form of listening

and it's powerful in most of our modern situations,

in business particularly,

it's a very important form of listening.

Best done consciously, though.

On the other end of that scale,

we have empathetic listening:

this is being with a person,

going on to their island,

understanding their point of view,

and not just letting them feel heard,

but letting them feel understood.

Empathetic listening.

And the final two I'll give you

are a slight gender stereotype,

but the research does bear out

that men and women listen in different ways.

Men tend to listen in what I call a reductive way.

That is for a point.

There's an objective to
a conversation between two men,

he's saying to him,
"I've got this problem",

he's saying, "there's a solution",
"thanks!"

That's a male conversation.
(Laughter)

Women on the other hand

tend to enjoy the journey,

the destination's not so important.

It's just being with -- look at the eye contact there.

Men are genetically programmed in hunting,

to be looking at the horizon
as they talk to each other.

We don't look at each other that much.

Women, very much more eye contact,
and it's expansive listening.

This creates another conflict in relationships.

If you're not conscious of it,

men, be conscious that women
may be listening expansively,

and may feel cut off.

If you say, "Yep, well, what's the point?"

Women on the other hand, may not understand

that men want to find a solution very quickly.

It's not rude, it's just the way we tend to listen.

But again, if you're conscious,

you can adopt different listening positions,

it's very powerful.

Let me give you a little acronym

which you can use in listening to other people talk:

the acronym is applicable in any relationship,

one of these will apply to all of you:

several, probably.

The acronym you can use is R.A.S.A.

Rasa is a sanskrit word, it means "juice."

It's also used in Indian theater

to indicate an emotional state.

So it's quite an appropriate acronym.

RASA: it stands for Receive, that is to say

make eye contact with the person who's talking.

Look interested,

lean forward slightly, and listen.

Appreciate.

That means little noises like "Hmm, oh,"

very important on the telephone.

I'm very bad at this,

on telephone calls, I'm regularly having

people saying: " Are you still there?"

(Laughter)

So very important.

Hhm, really! oh!

It helps the person.

Summarize: the word 'so'
is very important in listening.

So -- this -- So I hear that -- So --

Summarizing what I just said,

and then asking questions:
What do we do next?

So what does that mean?

So what'll happen next?

It's engaged! RASA.

That's a very good way to listen to anybody.

I want to finish, just for the last moment,

really that's been the phenomenology of listening,

it's been the process,
and how we can get better at it.

I just want to open a little door to you

to think about the ontology of listening.

What would it be to be --

listening,

not the source,

and not the listener,

but there's a thing in between us

which is listening.

Think of this:

listening is what places us
in space and in time.

You're listening to this whole room
all the time,

little micro-sounds around you

are placing you in a large group
of people in a big space.

And you do that all day every day.

It places you in space.

And very much in time!

Because all sound has got time embedded in it.

There is no such thing as a photograph in sound.

An instant of sound means nothing.

Sound is always in time,
time is always in sound.

The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy

said that sonority is time and meaning.

Herman Hesse said music is time
made esthetically perceptible.

So if listening places us in space and time,

really, listening is how we evoke the universe,

how we evoke the physical world,

and I should also mention the metaphysical

because people tend to hear God
a lot more than they see him,

and whichever spiritual path you're on,

listening and meditation and prayer

is a very important aspect of that connection.

Sound is my life, it's my passion, it's my business;

I live to listen. I'm not asking you to do that,

but I think I can turn that round the other way.

and suggest that we must all listen to live.

To live fully,

to be conscious of this fantastic world around us

and most important of all,
to be connected to each other.

Listen to live,

and thank you for listening to me today.

(Applause)