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

by Kate Murphy

feeling isolated and disconnected increases the risk of premature death as much as obesity and alcoholism combined. The negative health impact is worse than smoking fourteen cigarettes per day. Indeed, epidemiological studies have found links between loneliness and heart disease, stroke, dementia, and poor immune function.

In a culture infused with existential angst and aggressive personal marketing, to be silent is to fall behind. To listen is to miss an opportunity to advance your brand and make your mark.

Evolution gave us eyelids so we can close our eyes but no corresponding structure to close off our ears. It suggests listening is essential to our survival.

if you have someone in your life who listens to you and who you feel connected to, then the safer you feel stepping out in the world and interacting with others. You know you will be okay if you hear something or find out things that upset you because you have someone, somewhere, you can confide in and who will relieve your distress. It’s called having a secure base, and it’s a bulwark against loneliness.

The most valuable lesson I’ve learned as a journalist is that everybody is interesting if you ask the right questions. If someone is dull or uninteresting, it’s on you.

Thinking you already know how a conversation will go down kills curiosity and subverts listening, as does anxiety about the interaction.

“We all long to express ourselves to another, but if we think there will be the perfect person who will be able to receive it all, we will be disappointed,”

Moreover, when people feel insecure or isolated, they tend to overdramatize and espouse more extreme views to get attention.

The world is easier to navigate if you remember that people are governed by emotions, acting more often out of jealousy, pride, shame, desire, fear, or vanity than dispassionate logic.

Student protestors in recent years have said listening to opposing views and opinions made them feel “unsafe.”

Also notable is the discovery that people with autism have an excess of neurons in their amygdalae during childhood—making them overreactive—and then too few neurons when they are adults—often making them underreactive, or flat, in affect.

Misunderstandings, like differences of opinion, are valuable reminders that others are not like us, or even remotely like us. Because we only really know ourselves, it’s a natural tendency to have a solipsistic view of the world. We incorrectly assume other people’s logic and motivations resemble our own. But, of course, they have different backstories and baggage.

Fifteen percent of Americans, around 48 million people, have hearing loss. Sixty-five percent of them are under age sixty-five. As a result, hearing loss is viewed as a major public health issue, ranking as the third most common chronic physical condition after high blood pressure and arthritis.

Your brain goes with what it expects to hear rather than what is actually said or sometimes hears things when nothing is said at all.

They are a special combination of minute muscle contractions, particularly around the eyes and mouth, over which you have no control. You can fake a smile, put on a brave face, and feign surprise, but it’s not going to look the same as it would if you actually felt the emotions.

Actors?

Many journalists, including Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, prefer telephone to in-person interviews so they don’t get biased or distracted by the other person’s appearance or nonverbal tics. They may also not want to inadvertently influence the other person with their own body language or unsettle them by taking notes or consulting notes they’d taken in preparation for the interview.

Like it or not, we are participating in an attention economy, where advertisers pay billions to media companies to steal us away from whatever else we might want to focus on. Attention has become a commodity, bought and sold on sophisticated electronic exchanges where bidding occurs in real time based on data provided by your cell phone or web browser.

The quality of your attention doesn’t matter. Indeed, the more divided your attention, the more persuadable you are. The more likely you are to click Buy Now.

gossip allows us to judge who is trustworthy, who we want to emulate, how much we can get away with, and who are likely allies or adversaries. In this way, listening to gossip contributes to our development as ethical, moral members of society.

Researchers at Stanford University and the University of California–Berkeley found that subjects, when given the opportunity, readily gossiped about others who were untrustworthy in a financial game, which in turn led the cheaters to play nice to get back into everyone’s good graces. The conclusion was that organizations that allow their members to gossip will be more cooperative and deter selfishness better than those that don’t.