Listening and hearing are not the same thing

Listening and hearing are not the same

What we hear and what is said may be different.

More and more commercial activities now rely on telephone conversations, the larger companies claim to record these conversations, but has any “customer” been able to hear a play back of a disputed conversation? The interpretation of what words actually mean coupled with what being said is not always the same as what is heard; make this reliance on telephone conversations unsafe for the consumers.

How many people actually hear and retain every word that is said to them?

How many of us claim to listen but do it at a superficial level, not really taking it all in?

So many people hear the first few words that are said, then assume they know what the rest will be and so they shut down the intake and absorption of what is actually said. Later they claim what they assumed, was what was actually said and so claim they were misled, or the speaker now lies about what was said.

Listening, hearing, understanding, retaining, absorbing, are all different things; yet so often it is assumed they are the same. Commercial communications businesses claim that what their telephone sales or customer relation advisors say, must be taken as what the customer hears and understands. This is often a false claim.

Some definitions:-

Listening—taking heed; concentrating on what is being said, paying attention.

Hearing--- the sense by which sound is received, to be informed of,

Understanding-- to know and comprehend the meaning

Comprehend—to understand. To gather and interpret information so as to be fully and completely aware of all applications and ramifications of that information.

Note that hearing does not imply understanding. Comprehension depends on prior knowledge that can be applied to the fresh information. So, if the listener, the recipient of the sales pitch, or customer relation excuse, does not have prior information that is relevant; they cannot comprehend or fully understand what is being said.

This is what marketing relies on. Look at the adverts for cosmetics, huge use is made of scientific sounding words which look and sound impressive but have very little base in science. They rely on the fact that very few consumers have much knowledge, prior information, about science.

Active listening is rare outside of professional therapists who are trained to actually listen to every nuance of what a client is saying, active listening fits the definition of listening shown above and we should all practice this far more often than we do. Most of us, for most of the time, think we are listening, but we do not focus intensely on what is being said, we are distracted by other sounds and other sensory inputs. Partially deaf people probably correctly listen better than non-deaf people, simply because they have to. Partially deaf people have problems if there are two or more audio inputs at the same time. The sounds merge with each other so they are aware of the streams of sound but cannot separate them into meaningful information streams. For this reason, the partially deaf have to try and shut out all sound other than the one selected as important.

Selective hearing is something we all practice from time to time, if the audio input is thought to be unimportant, we mentally shut down absorption of that input. It may be background “music” in a store or from the radio. It may be a conversation that is boring, but our brains prevent true listening even if our physical appearance is that of a listener. The difficulty that arises from this is that the memory files in our brains, have not received the data contained in the shut-out audio input and so if questioned, we have no recall of what was said. A similar effect occurs with misinterpretation; this may be due to lack of prior knowledge or due to a belief that is in conflict with the new information and so rejects selective parts of prior knowledge. These combine and the information gets “adjusted” by our brains and so correct understanding does not take place. We humans also have anticipation, the expectation of events and outcomes, this can be a problem because we can have an expectation of what is going to be said then, without genuine active listening, we record, in our memory the expectation of what is to be said, rather than what is actually said. We also tend to “hear what we want to hear” rather than what is said. If we fervently want to hear something we tend to auto-interpret what is said to fit to that which is desired. The same can happen in a negative way, if we fear a response, we can interpret whatever is said in a negative way. The timing is also important, if a car passenger starts talking to the driver as they negotiate a strange junction in heavy traffic or at speed it is not surprising if the driver is not able to absorb and comprehend what is said. For most of us there is a limit to how much data can be implanted in the memory, if at the same time, the mind is focused and active with other tasks.

Listening properly is difficult because in our modern world there is so much competition for our attention, everything is said and done at greater speed. Unless we are focused on listening, it is inevitable that mistakes will occur, and time and energy are wasted. We end up buying things that do not live up to our expectations because we hear the marketing “message” not the factual words. We end up being disappointed because our expectations are not fulfilled, this is often because we did not truly absorb and comprehend what was actually said.