"Am I just background noise?"
My husband narrates as he putters, often with questions to which, in truth, he expects no answers. I hear him as I sit in the kitchen focused on my email, or on the couch concentrating on a book or a TV show, or as I multitask at the stove, roasting vegetables and grilling chicken for dinner. "What did I do with my pen? This printer isn't working. Should I go for a run?" His questions and running commentary take on the quality of the hum of the fridge or the buzz of the cicadas, and at some point, it's true, they slip away and I don't hear them anymore.
And then I miss it. The question that DID need an answer. The comment that DID need a response. "Vicki, can you hear me?" I snap back to attention when my name is called, and feel guilty.
Physiologically speaking, the answer is yes, I can hear. But I was no longer listening. And according to a terrific article by Seth Horowitz, an auditory neuroscientist at Brown, this is normal. My brain processes the sounds my ears detect differently depending upon whether I am paying attention. ("Why Listening is so Much More than Hearing")
According to Horowitz, hearing--which happens faster than all our other senses--is our first defense mechanism in a dangerous world. We have a finely honed system that filters out the typical and the safe sounds as we unconsciously monitor our environment for the unusual sounds that might signal trouble. The everyday, untroubling, safe sounds recede in favor of those that are new, different, or irregular.
Good for avoiding sabre tooth tigers. Bad for relationships.
When I pay attention, I use a different set of pathways and an area of the brain that engages more actively. When I focus, I am able not only to hear, but to listen. And when I am listening to the sputter of the chicken in the pan or the ding of the email notification, I am not listening to the patter of the person whose presence makes me feel safe yet whose voice has receded, drowned out by other interruptions.
The skill is to find ways to pay attention, to detect the more subtle changes in the voice I hear every day, the small differences in tone or timbre that denote a change in emotion, a move from narration to need. Horowitz says this is possible. The world around me gets noisier, and the interruptions continue to increase, yet I can, must, train myself to listen, not just hear.
