So welcome back to the office. And let's take a deep dive into hearing and listening. Now in this picture, you can see your ear, we always think of the air is that thing on the outside of our head that's actually called the pinna, at funny shaped flap of skin, which is carefully designed actually to gather sound waves and focus them down that little hole towards what you see in there, which is a tiny little membrane, no bigger than the nail on your little finger really called the eardrum. And it's a miracle to me that that little membrane vibrating decodes all of the sound around you from a Beethoven symphony, to an explosion in a movie. Anything that you can think of your your baby's first cry, all of those sounds are decoded by that little membrane vibrating. Just inside that membrane are three little bones.

One of them's got its foot on the membrane. So when the membrane is vibrating like this thousands of times a second, it oscillates those bones thousands of times a second. And there's a little sequence of three bones, which then tap on another little membrane. On the other side of that is fluid in that shell shaped organ you see there, the cochlea, that's full of fluid, and inside the fluid are tiny little hairs on all sides of that spiral. And the hairs are tuned, they react at different frequencies. So if you hear a low note certain hairs will vibrate and react and if you hear hear a high note, other hairs will be tuned to that frequency and they will vibrate and as they vibrate, they trigger a reaction across a cell wall on the other side of which is a neuron and that then take some electrical signal to your brain.

So this is a process that starts off physical sound is actually sound waves touching you deep inside your head. It's a very intimate sense. It's almost touch. And it's passive. You have no ear lids I'm very fond of saying. So you can't shut it out unless you block your ears with something.

And it is an incredible sequence of events that allows us to decode all of the sounds around us and I'm eternally grateful every minute of every day, I think I listen in wonder, because this process is so extraordinary, the engineering so amazing, millions of years of evolution to get to this point where we have these ears. Now, there is not a vertebrate on this planet, as far as I know, that doesn't have ears. There are quite a few that don't have eyes. But hearing is fundamental. It's your primary warning sense. So It's very, very intuitive that electrical signal going into your brain first of all goes to your limbic system, the, the primitive brain, where it's reactive, you get a sudden noise and your body will react instinctively, before you have time to process what's happened.

Afterwards, you'll process it. And that's where we get into listening. But the hearing happens at a very, very basic level, it's survival. And it's not surprising. Now, your hearing can get damaged. Unfortunately, most of us are born with pristine hearing able to hear from something like 20 hertz or 20 cycles a second, up to 20,000 hertz 20,000 cycles a second or 20 kilohertz.

Now, that's a pretty wide range. It's an enormous range, something in the range of 10 octaves, and you hear in a sphere all around you. Of course, I don't know about you. I'm not very good at Seeing behind me, but I can certainly hear behind me and again primary wanting sense, the range of intensity of your hearing is extraordinary from the quietest thing you can hear to the loudest thing you could tolerate before getting quite serious damage is in the range of about a trillion times. So that is an enormous range of intensity. Now, as I say, unfortunately, this wonderful sentence can be damaged and the most common form of damage is for letters.

Noise induced hearing loss that can happen if you're working in heavy industry for a long time without sufficient protection. 85 decibels is the level at which protection has to be offered to people. It's often not. And I think of people who have to work in nightclubs for example, Night after night, in much louder sound than that many of the people working behind the decks in nightclubs are sensible the DJs they have hearing protection with the people at the bar. stuff, the waiting stuff very rarely do they do that, and their hearing is being seriously damaged. Or if you're in a pounding factory or any kind of loud environment, of course, war can do terrible damage to people's hearing.

It's not only loud sounds like that, which can affect hearing. It's also headphone abuse. One in six American teenagers is suffering from noise induced hearing loss as a result of headphone abuse. It's a really worrying sign because as you get older, your hearing degrades. So we may be raising a whole Deaf generation there. It's very important.

If you're wearing headphones to use the best you can i'll come on to that in a moment. Something like 40 million, maybe 50 million Americans have got some form of noise induced hearing loss. That's an enormous proportion. What's that 20% of the population something in that region. So it is a major problem in many countries. Now.

We have to look after a hearing. If you have something called temporary threshold shift That may not be the end of the world that does indicate you've damaged your hearing. But if you've been to a loud gig and you lose the top end, you know you can't hear. And for a day or two, it's not permanent. But don't do it too often. Because if you have that happening over and over again, you will damage your hearing.

And it's like eroding ice from underneath. It looks okay until you go through and then it's too late. Once those little cell hair cells in your ears have been flattened, there's no going back, you can't regrow them. I did meet somebody at TED med few years ago, who said he was instigating stem cell research to see if it would be possible to regrow as little hair cells that would cure deafness in potentially millions of people. You can't do it yet. So please, look after your ears.

And there is another form of deficiency with hearing stress induced auditory dysfunction which comes if you have a sound that particularly causes you stress over and over Again, some people then become deaf. At those frequencies, it's more of a mental thing sadly happens in relationships, for example, where there's a continual hectoring, or arguing going on. And one partner can go deaf to the other partners voice that truly so stress induced auditory dysfunction. Now let's talk about these things for a moment. Later in the course we'll talk about ways of using them well, but unfortunately, a lot of people have cheap headphones in it. My strongest piece of advice to you if you're going to wear headphones, is to get the best ones you possibly can.

If you have cheap headphones, the tendency is to keep turning them up all the time. And that is where the problems start to arise. So I have Odyssey headphones, they're fantastic top of the range headphones, not for everybody because they are quite expensive, very expensive actually. Nevertheless, you know, if you can't afford a great stereo system, it's better to spend the money on an Amazing pair of headphones as long as you're quite selfish and you're listening and you want to share it with other people, because you'll get the same quality of sound for a much lower price about 20 times less, give or take. If I'm traveling I use something else entirely. And that is Sony.

Wh 1000 x m three i think is the label for them hard to remember. It's not very snappy as it but they are absolutely beautiful. And to me, I don't get paid for this. top of the range. Now in terms of noise cancellation, they are very good at removing constant drone type sounds like aircraft noise. If you're in an aircraft or road noise.

If you're in a car you don't want to drive with headphones on but if you're a passenger, of course, so they're extremely good at that they won't cancel certain sounds, but they're very good at canceling annoying background noise and the sound quality is first class. I think they pick bows at the moment but who knows bows may fight back And there's they're certainly both very good at noise canceling. There are many other brands out there. And I do recommend that you try a few and see what you personally enjoy. But the rule is, get the best headphones you can possibly afford. And then you won't have the tendency to keep telling them up and damaging your hearing.

Of course, sometimes we aren't wearing headphones, and we're surrounded by noise. And my advice to you, if that's the case is just walk away. It's amazing how often I see people bellowing a conversation next to somebody who's drilling and I think why don't you move. It's incredible. But we don't we get habituated to this noise and we suppress, suppress, suppress, and we end up standing in places which really hurt. We do get used to things unfortunately.

So again, my suggestion to you is to be conscious about this now, one exercise I do recommend in this section of The course is to go out and test your hearing. If you've got any concerns at all, you may have perfect hearing, in which case that's wonderful for you. I haven't I'm a drummer, I lost the top end of my hearing some years ago through cymbals crashing and bouncing off. Often you'll put behind perspex screens and it makes all the sound bounce straight back at you. And I didn't know enough in the early years to get myself hearing protection. If you have to work in any kind of loud noise, I do suggest you get some sort of protection.

On the left you have these silicon molded hearing protectors. These are actually in ear monitors which are used by people on stage musicians a great deal these days. They're silicon molded to fit your exact ear canals. So you go to an audiologist. And if you don't know where they are, they're normally in the same place as an optician. Or if you ask an optician, they'll they'll know where the audiologist is, and they will inject it doesn't hurt.

They'll put a sort of gel into your ears, it sets. And then it becomes the mold for these things which they make exactly for your ear. And inside them, you could have monitor loudspeakers like these, or you can simply have a little filter, which removes the noise. It reduces the sound pressure level, but in a flat way so that you still hear everything just a lot quieter. Mine attenuate by 15 decibels, so it makes it roughly one and a half times quieter than the natural sound, which means if you're drumming, it's very comfortable. So I recommend that if you have to go to loud places or endure loud things, some people like these with mild attenuation just for walking around in cities.

If you can't get those silicon molded ones, you can get cheaper ones like the picture on the right, they're available from music shops for just a few pounds of dollars, and they also help a great deal. So that's something on hearing about miraculous sense, and a very important one. Let's move on to listening, which is not the same thing at all. I love this quote from Hemingway. I think he's right. Anybody who can listen well has got major advantages over people who don't listen, which is, let's face it, the vast majority of people.

So if you can learn to listen, it gives you a really big advantage in life in general, you're more aware, you're more astute, you're more in tune, you're more connected, and you understand far more of what's going on around you. I could give you an analogy from nature. Here we are, this little chap, very successful is a squirrel. And that's because of three things. They're fast. They're strong, and they're very agile and flexible.

Now, those are good things to be in life, aren't they to be quick To be strong, and to be agile or flexible. It's not enough, though. And you look at this little guy, what's he doing? He is listening. He's being aware of his surroundings. And the main way he's doing that is listening.

If you watch any animal feeding, they'll be feeding and they'll look up from time to time, but all the time they're feeding, they're listening, listening, listening really, really carefully. And you still do that. Now, we all do it, listening for survival. It's not just survival and success as a species that we get from listening. As I said, there are many benefits to good listening, you learn, you can lead people well, if you listen to them and understand them. You can persuade people, if you understand what somebody needs, it's very much easier to persuade them to join your enroll in whatever you want.

Listening is crucial for successful relationships, and for understanding other people. So let's look at this thing. Well, we spend up to 60% of our time listening, according to the research, it depends on what job you're doing what you do in your life. Nevertheless, that's, that's not unreasonable as an average. However, we retain only one word in four of what we hear. So we're not particularly good at it.

And for those of you who employ people, if I just run that through in numbers, you'll see how significant this is. So if you pay somebody $100,000, that says, senior person, that senior person is going to be spending $60,000 worth of their time listening, but they'll only be retaining $15,000 worth of what they hear, which means you're wasting $45,000 a year on paying them to listen badly. Now, I'm sure you think that's not me. I'm going to run a little test on you now, and let's see how well you do. So you might want to get a piece of paper or something you can write on all For you to take notes on this, because it's a listening test. Okay.

It's called the bus. Are you ready? If not, pause, and come back. So let's assume you're now ready. Okay, you're the bus driver at the first stop, four people get on three of them are male, and one is female. And one of the males has a red hat.

At the second stop, five people get on, two of them are male, three of them are female, and two males get off. At the third stop. Three people get on they're all male and one of them has a blue umbrella. At the fourth stop, two people get off they're both male, and one leaves behind the black back. At the fifth stop 12 people get on. That's eight males and four females.

Two of the males are wearing football scarves and three people get off all male including the one with the Red Hat. Okay, you ready to be tested? My question to you is, how old is the bus driver? Confused? What was the first thing I said at the beginning of this long tirade? You're a bus driver.

You know how old you are? That's the answer. So we don't listen. Very often we don't listen. Now, if you did succeed in that test, congratulations. Perhaps you're a much better listener than the average but most people don't.

Listening is a skill. It's a skill. And it's one I really want to teach you as we go through this course. Because if you have a skill in listening, then it makes your speaking so much more powerful. Unfortunately, I think listening is a dying skill. And we'll come back to that when we look at the dark side.

In the next section of the course. There are two parts to listen to Two parts. First of all, you select things to pay attention to. So this is the crucial difference between hearing and listening, you hear everything you select some things to listen to, to pay attention to. The next thing you do is you interpret them you make them mean something, which you do perhaps by association. So the sound that's going to mean the most to you might be your name.

If your name is john, and you're in a crowd of people, and somebody says, john, you immediately jump. There are many other sounds, which will have deep meanings for you personally. And association is very important in this interpretation of meaning making that we do. If you don't recognize a sound, your brain will try and match it against things you've heard before and see if it matches and what it might mean. Unknown sounds can be dangerous, so we also noticed those pretty easily. Constant sounds tend to get dismissed pretty quickly.

Like the sound of air conditioning in an office. After a few minutes, you don't hear it at all. Actually, we don't listen to it at all. You still hear it but your brain is going I'm not listening to that. It's doing the same thing it was doing before. So it ceases to be something that you're conscious of you don't listen to it.

So my definition of listening is making meaning from sound making meaning from sound. This is a purely mental process, not physical, not chemical, not electrical, mental, making meaning from sound. And the absolutely crucial realization that I want to give you in this part of the course. Is that your listening is unique. Your listening is unique as unique as your fingerprints, your iris will voiceprint Why is your listening unique? By the way, it's a hugely common mistake that people make to think everybody listens like I do.

They don't. Everybody's listening is unique, not just yours, everybody's, which is where the whole idea of speaking into listening comes from. Now you can see how that works. The reason your listening is unique, is because you listen through a set of filters. Here they are. So first of all, the culture you're born into, and the language you speak, languages vary enormously as to cultures and the way they listen.

Tonal languages exist on this planet where the way you say a word affects its meaning enormously. Other languages, like Bantu, for example, has no real distinction between past and present. And it is true to say that there are languages in the north of the Inuit people where there are dozens of words for different types of snow for example, So the way you listen is highly affected by your language. Some languages have words for things that don't exist in other languages. And culture also is very important. I always think of Finland, which is a very taciturn country unless the vodka has been flowing.

I've been to Finland and I've given talks in the wonderful concert hall in Helsinki. And the Finns are very taciturn people. The joke is that the Finns idea of a great night out is to go around to somebody's house, sit in silence for three hours and then go home. So they don't say much, and they're not very loud. And at the end of my talk in that concert hall, that last one I gave, there was a sort of, and I thought I bombed. And then people, when I went to have a cup of coffee afterwards, people coming up to me and saying, that was the best talk we have had for many years.

And I realized Actually, that's the way the Finns express themselves. You know, if it had been in some parts of America, they might have been whooping and hollering I guess We express ourselves in different ways. We listen in different ways, the language and culture caused us to have a different appreciation. And then we have the values, attitudes and beliefs that you will create along the way as you grow, from your parents, from your teachers, from your friends, from role models, all of the people that you meet along the way, you'll take certain things that you find attractive or interesting or valuable. And you'll create those and they become your values, attitudes, and beliefs. We will do some work on values a little bit later on in the course because it's an incredibly important thing to do.

If you're going to speak in power. It's important to stand on values that you understand. However, you have got them and their filters. And this is where it starts to become difficult to listen to people who perhaps you don't agree with. And I've already given you that exercise to do. It's a very good one.

I think Barack Obama's I like to listen to people with whom I disagree. It's a very good practice to do that. And then we have assumptions. We'll come on to assumptions a lot when we talk about the agents of miscommunication. Again in the dark side, because the A of agent stands for assumptions, you may have assumptions about the way things work in the world about what goes on in other people's heads, what they're thinking of you, how they receive you how you're landing, well, you can never know that you hit the ball over the net. And you can ever know what happens on the other side.

Because it's opaque to us. You can't ever know another human being fully. So we make assumptions. And if we become conscious about those assumptions, then we can challenge them and not think they're the truth. You may have expectations in any given situation going in you may be expecting something to happen. And then you could be disappointed or overwhelmed or whatever but the way you expect things to happen can affect how you listen to what really is going on.

And my father had a wonderful phrase expectation is the mother of resentment. So the more we expect, then the more we set ourselves up to be disappointed. So it's good to again to be conscious of our expectations. So again, we can challenge them. So okay, I was expecting that. I just made that up.

And it's not what's happened actually, this is different, but really quite nice. And then we may have intentions going in, we may have something we want to happen between us and the other person, maybe it's something they are going to do or something we want to achieve. And again, that colors the way we listen. And finally emotions absolutely affect the way we listen. So the way you listen, your filters change over time. Happy listening, very different from angry listening and it changes from person to person.

From situation to situation. So it's a moving feast, your listening is never fixed, it's fluid. And yet, your filters are pretty strong. And certainly the ones at the top of this list can become very immovable, and unconsciously, like concrete that can ossify and set you in a state where it's very difficult to listen to people with whom you don't agree. What this all does, of course, if you think about the difference between reality, what's actually out there, and what we think of reality is these things affect your perception, they change what you select to pay attention to, and they change what you make it mean. So you may not be able to hear people with whom you really disagree, and you may make it mean they're stupid or ignorant or whatever it is.

We can do that all the time. So these to actually create your reality, because your reality is your perception, we only have the map, we don't ever have the territory, the way you listen changes the way you perceive the world. You might imagine a slight from somebody who never meant it. Or you might miss a compliment from somebody who's not very good at giving you the right kind of compliment. You can easily misinterpret people and make up stuff about what's going on. And that becomes your reality.

So again, the key is consciousness. becoming conscious of those filters is so powerful, and we will be doing that. Now, there's an exercise I do recommend to you here. So we've given you in the workbook for this section, a list of those filters, and the exercise is to consider each of them and so how does this work for me, one of my particular filters, and how do they play out in my life and of course, it's important to remember that your filters are different from other people's. That's why their listing is different from yours and their reality is different from yours. Listening affects the other senses.

The senses interrelate, in a way that's called cross modal cross modal effects are the ways in which the senses powerfully affect one another. So this is one of the very few auditory illusions that exist. Your ears are far harder to fall than your eyes. There are many visual illusions very few auditory illusions handful, really. And this is one of the good ones. It's called the McGurk effect.

And aunt Marceau was kind enough to let me have this little loop of film. So what I'd like you to do is look at the screen and listen to what this guy's saying. Bah bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. Okay, you're probably hearing bah bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. Now close your eyes in this ah Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba Bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. She's saying bah bah, bah bah.

If you look at the screen again, bah, bah, bah, you'll hit daughter again, probably, most people do bah bah. On the video. He's actually saying Gaga. I'm gonna stop it there. On the video. He's saying Gaga on the audio he's saying, Baba, so your icy Gaga your ears hear Baba and your brain says that's data, it's gonna be data.

And that's how it works. Now, that's not the only cross modal effect. I'll give you a couple of other examples to let you know how this works. This is one where sound affected mouthfeel. In other words, touch. They gave people potato crisps or chips depending on which country you live in.

And they had the people wearing headphones and without telling the people, they altered the sound that was being fed into the headphones. They changed it by boosting a high frequency five kilohertz. It's a pretty high frequency. The result was that the people who had the frequency boost It reported that the crisps or chips were 15% crunchy than the people who didn't have the frequency boosted. So the sound of the crisper chip eating changed the mouthfeel it changed the experience of people in terms of how crunchy it was. There's another nice example.

This was a product which has been pretty popular around the world. And I think in the UK, it's called link. So elsewhere, it's called x when CFCs were banned, the chemical that was used in aerosols for a long time that went from going to going and people wrote in in large numbers to complain that the product was no longer as strong as it used to be. It wasn't working as well simply wasn't as good as it used to be. So the manufacturers spent a great deal of money redesigning the packaging without CFCs it now goes again, it's working fine. So the sound of the packaging affected how well people thought the actual product was working.

One final example, which if you're a restaurant should concern you. And this example is research which proves that loud noise deadens our sense of taste. If one sense is overloaded, there's huge Bedlam in a restaurant. And let's face it, there is huge Bedlam in many restaurants. I won't go back if it's like that. And please do complain if you experience that.

It's not nice. And it stops us from tasting the food, particularly sugar, and salt. We don't taste those two things, as well, when the noise is suppressing our ability to sense. So, senses affect one another. Hearing and listening are crucial to your appreciation of life and to your ability to speak because the way you speak is formed by the way you listen and also So the way you hear yourself. So I hope you've enjoyed that little tour through hearing and listening.

I'm going to hand back to myself now, to summarize this, the third part of this course, before we move on to Part Four