You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

by Kate Murphy

He and his colleagues had subjects listen to an adapted version of the J. D. Salinger short story “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes,” which describes a telephone conversation between Arthur and Lee. Arthur tells Lee he suspects his wife is having an affair while an unidentified woman lies in bed next to Lee. Before hearing the story, half the subjects were told the woman in bed with Lee is Arthur’s wife. The other cohort was told Arthur is paranoid and the woman is Lee’s girlfriend. That one differing detail was enough to significantly change the subjects’ brain patterns while listening to the story so that Hasson could easily tell who thought the wife was a two-timer and who thought she was faithful. If that was all it took to separate people into neurally distinct groups, just think what’s happening in the brains of people habitually listening to, say, Fox News versus CNN. If you tell both factions the exact same thing, their brains will measurably hear it differently, as the signals are routed through distinct pathways depending on what they had previously heard. “It will reshape your mind,” Hasson told me. “It will affect the way you listen.” It’s an argument for listening to as many sources as possible to keep your brain as agile as possible. Otherwise, your brain becomes like a car that’s not firing on all cylinders or a computer circuit board where electrical impulses run through a limited number of channels, wasting its full capacity.