Archive for February, 2011
Another Listening Barrier: Comparing
Another Listening Barrier: Comparing
“How does he have the nerve to make that assertion when I gave him different facts about the project. He doesn’t know half as much as I do.”
“Wait one minute. Where does she come off saying her department is worse than mine? Her boss doesn’t pile work on an hour before closing on Friday.”
“I refuse to get flustered like that. Life’s too short to let work rule you.”
What are the chances any of those people are listening? Zero. They are too busy comparing their lot to someone else. It’s impossible to listen to what someone else is saying when you’re trying to figure out how you’re smarter, more of a victim, more emotionally with it, and especially, more competent.
It’s very natural to insert yourself into any listening situation, and it’s hard not to compare what someone else is saying to what you think and feel. That said, changing from being in a reactive mode to being responsive or reflective, can greatly influence the degree of comparison you’re engaging in as a listener.
For example, instead of saying, “He doesn’t know half as much as I do,” to “I have to listen to figure out how he used the facts I gave him that lead him to a different conclusion.” Those changes in words and attitude will allow the listener to stay with what being said rather than with counterproductive emotion.
Listening at its highest level is intended to create mutual meaning. If any of the parties has a different agenda, that is, to compare oneself to others, there will not be shared meaning. The more I learn about listening, the more I understand – to do it well is to do it without ego.
More Research to Share #2
This post is a continuation of articles taken from Discover Magazine, Fall, 2010 issue on The Brain.
From the lead article:
Inside Man by David Ewing Duncan, pp 5-11
“With the power of neuroimaging, Discover reporter David Ewing Duncan takes a magical mystery tour of his own mind, exploring fear, memory, and faith.”
MJT: I’ve been following the work of Dr. Adam Gazzaley, director of The Brain Lab at University of California at San Francisco, and have cited his work in previous posts. In this article, the author goes to the UCSF lab to test his ability to remember.
“Through his research, Gazzaley has set out to prove that the brain does not lose its ability to remember as it ages but rather loses its ability to filter out unwanted memories; in a sense it remembers too much. He is demonstrating that the frontal lobe—the rational and decision-making part of the brain—has a major influence on what is retained by the hippocampus and the brain’s other emotional centers. Neuroscientists call this function top-down modulation, a process by which the frontal lobe guides both what people recall and what they do not want or need to burn into their memory cells. The brain does the same thing with hearing. Young ears (and brains) can easily discern the voice of a friend sitting across a table in a noisy bar; as ears and brains age, they are less able to pick out the friend’s voice from the barrage of others sounds. ‘We think it’s a filtering problem,’ Gazzaley says.”
MJT: Because aging brains do not always filter out what it was supposed to ignore, we must really focus our listening to absorb what is crucial. If you sense you’re not filtering well, learn and use techniques to keep yourself attuned.
Article:
The Internet Makes Deep Thought Difficult, if Not Impossible by Nichols Carr, pp. 13-15
MJT: I love the following analogy the author makes.
“Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved in transferring information from working memory into longer term memory. By regulating the velocity and intensity of information flow, media exert a strong influence on this process. When we read a book, the information faucet provides a steady drip, which we can control by the pace of our reading. Through our single-minded concentration on the text, we can transfer all or most of the information, thimbleful by thimbleful, into long-term memory and forge the rich associations essential to the creation of schemas. With the Net, we face many information faucets, all going full blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from one faucet to the next. We’re able to transfer only a small portion of the information to long-term memory, and what we do transfer is a jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream from one source.”
“…improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively….The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.” Quoted from Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience unit at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
“The Roman philosopher Seneca may have put it best two thousand years ago: ’To be everywhere is to be nowhere.’”
More Research to Share #1
This post is all taken from Discover Magazine, Fall, 2010 issue on The Brain.
Article:
Meet Your Secret Master “The rational part of your brain isn’t always in charge. Often, the automatic, unconscious side takes control—and you don’t even know it. By Carl Zimmer, pp 47-49.
“A number of networks in our brain process information without troubling our awareness….It may be that our conscious and unconscious minds are parallel systems, each specialized for handling different kinds of tasks….
The zombie mind may take over simple, repetitive tasks from our conscious mind, leaving the latter free to focus on the kinds of thought we do best with self-awareness. “
MJT: Maybe we can listen and do something else at the same time, but nothing complex. For example, I can make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and talk on the phone to a friend about the weather; but I cannot read a recipe and try to make Peking Duck while talking to anyone but myself.
In another article, Mindless, in the magazine, pp. 64-65, Carl Zimmer also provides some worthy points from the work of Jonathan Schooler, psychologist, UC Santa Barbara, a leading researcher on mind wandering:
- On average, students in a research study reported that their minds wandered about 5.4 times in a 45-minute session.
- When given a new task, the less often the subjects’ minds wandered, but as the task became more practiced, the more mind-wandering increased.
- Mood affects mind wandering. When shown a sad vs comedy video, the sad video group experienced more mind wandering than the comedy video group.
- There are two kinds of mind wandering: when you are aware your mind is wandering and when you are unaware. Schooler call the latter state, “zoning out.”
- We spend about 13% of our time zoned out.
- When the mind wanders we are more likely to make mistakes, fail to encode memories, or miss a connection.
- Mind wandering is not a useless activity. It allows us to work through important thinking. Our b rains process information to reach goals. Some of those goals are immediate while others take reflection time.
MJT: It seems to me that the onus is on the listener to know when it is absolutely imperative to be tuned in and learn how to control mind wandering. When people have no-preferred listening habits, that is, when all four habits show up to be the same, they have to work very hard to keep their minds engaged. Brains tire and wandering happens.
Article:
Quick! Stop Thinking by Carlin Flora, pp50-51
“…there is work in clinical psychology showing that writing helps limit ruminative thoughts—those negative thoughts that are very hard to shake and that seem to grow the more you dwell on the, The idea is that you cognitively outsource your worries to the page.”
MJT: Over-thinking can shut down listening, especially for inner-personal listeners who run a negative internal conversation that grabs attention away from the listening interaction.