Posts Tagged ‘research’
Listening Skills in our World: Recent Research on the Brain and Listening, Part 3
5. Creative types are often seen as rather flaky — their minds leaping wildly from one bizarre idea to another, ever seeking inspiration. But a new study suggests that people who actually achieve creative success have minds that stubbornly cling to ideas, even to the point where it impairs their ability to shift focus.
Lead author Darya Zabelina, is a graduate student at Northwestern. The research was published in Frontiers in Psychology.
6. Over the past decade, Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, has shown that bilingual children develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies, learning different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking, skills that are often considered part of the brain’s so-called executive function.
7. The difference in listening habits of men and women is more than just perceptual. A study by Dr. Michael Phillips, a neuroaudiologist at the Indiana University School of Medicine, found gender differences in the brain activity of men and women. Brain imaging scans showed that the left-brain hemisphere of men in the study was activated while listening, while both hemispheres were activated in women. This data suggests that there is a physical difference in listening between men and women.
ehow.com, “Differences in Listening Between a Man and a Woman,” by Ashley Black
8. A new survey shows 63 percent of Americans take a vitamin or supplement, but many wish the manufacturers would come up with a vitamin that would improve their significant other’s listening skills.
Commissioned by The Vitamin Cottage May 17, 2012
9. In his article in the Huffington Post, Wray Herbert discusses declining memory in Baby Boomers and what might help keep them sharp into old age. He cites a study from the Synapse Center, a senior activity center in Dallas, which also acts as a cognitive aging lab for psychological scientist Denise C. Park and colleagues at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Participants, aged 60-90, agreed to commit to a lifestyle change, learning a new skill (in this case quilting and digital photography) in a social environment that demanded the use of core cognitive abilities. A third group divided their time between the two new activities getting a variety of mental stimulation but less of any one cognitive demand. In addition there were three other groups that participated in social activities at the Center (something researchers believe to be beneficial in keeping the mind sharp), which required meeting and socializing with new people but no formal training. Others participated at home, where they engaged in activities that many believe to be beneficial, although not proven so, such as listening to classical music or working on puzzles. Others acted as the control group and did nothing out of the ordinary. The scientists believed, but wanted to document, that productive engagement is the key to maintaining mental sharpness.
The results were surprising; the photography students, including the ones doing both activities, did have a significant boost in memory when compared to the quilters. Interestingly, the quilters did not outperform the photographers in spatial processing. The photographers had a slight edge in this skill as well. Perhaps the bigger surprise for the researchers was that socialization was not as beneficial as anticipated.
Huffington Post, July 9, 2013, “Aging Photographs and Cognitive Quilts”
Listening Skills in our World: Recent Research on the Brain and Listening, Part 2
Thank you for reading this second part of three blog posts about recent fascinating research on the brain and listening. I found them all thought provoking; I hope you do too.
3. Believe it or not, according to neuroscience placing our attention on pain in the body makes pain exist because the circuits that perceive pain in the brain become electrically activated. By putting our awareness on something else other than pain, the brain circuits that process pain and bodily sensations can and will be literally turned off, and presto, the pain goes away. But when we look to see if the pain is gone for good, the corresponding brain circuits once again become activated and as they continuously fire, their connections become more permanently strengthened. By paying attention to pain on a daily basis, we are wiring ourselves neurologically to develop a more acute awareness of pain perception because the related brain circuits become more enriched. Our own personal attention has that much of an effect on us. This could be one solution to how pain or even our past memories characterize us. What we repeatedly think about and what we focus our attention on is what we neurologically become. Neuroscience has finally understood that we can mold and shape the neurological framework of self by the repeated attention we give to any one thing.
“The Thought of You” Joe Dispenza
4. …most learning benefits from give and take. And the greater the number of students in the room, the lesser the chance for interaction and, hence, for education in the classical sense of the term—educere, to draw out. As Koller, the Coursera cofounder puts it. “When you’re giving a lecture and you stop to ask a question, 50% of the class are scribbling away and didn’t hear you, another 20% are on Facebook, and one smarty-pants in the front row blurts out the answer and you feel good.”… “Why not take the 75-minute lecture, Koller asks, “break it up into short pieces, and add interactive engagement into the video so that every five minutes there’s a question?”
Fast Company, p.101,”The Coursera Effect”
Listening Skills in our World: Recent Research on the Brain and Listening, Part 1
1. 
Dispatches from the scientific front brought to us by popular science wunderkind Jonah Lehrer. There is indeed a part of the brain associated with a sudden “ah-ha moment” of the type linked to key breakthroughs of luminaries such as Isaac Newton and Archimedes. It is called the anterior superior temporal gyrus and it is situated in the right hemisphere of the brain, just above your ear. When you get a sudden insight it registers a huge spike in activity, just like that light bulb.
2. In a study scientists have observed that our brain stops us from getting bored when listening to uninteresting people by “rewriting” a dull speech to make it an interesting one.
The researchers have also observed that people listening to boring speeches adjust by creating an “inner voice” to drown out the offending speech.
The response in the brain starts the moment the brain listens to “monotonously-spoken” words it feels should be more communicative.
The consequent increase in the brain activity indicates to the presence of an inner voice, which makes “more vivid speech” in the place of boring speech, says the study conducted by scientists at the University of Glasgow’s Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology.
“You may think the brain need not produce its own speech while listening to one that is already available. But, apparently, the brain is very picky on the speech it hears,” Dr Bo Yao, the principal author of the research has been quoted as saying to the Telegraph.
“When the brain hears monotonously-spoken direct speech quotations which it expects to be more vivid, the brain simply ‘talks over’ the speech it hears with more vivid speech utterances of its own.
“By doing so, the brain attempts to optimise the processing of the incoming speech, ensuring more speedy and accurate responses,” Yao stated.
The NeuroImage Journal has published the finding in the Sat, 24 March 2012 issue
Educational and Entertaining Listening Skills Research
There’s always new research being done on listening. I only report to you what’s documented, even the outré ones. Following are three pieces that I found fascinating.
1. According to the research results reported on Science Daily, children who participate in music lessons for as few as 1 to 5 years show improved neural processing of sounds as they near adulthood. This may translate to enhanced listening and learning for a lifetime.
“Based on what we already know about the ways that music helps shape the brain the study suggests that short-term music lessons may enhance lifelong listening and learning.” says Nina Kraus, the Hugh Knowles Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology and Communication Sciences at Northwestern.
2. This one requires a bit of a stretch to see how the research relates to listening—it’s really about voice, which is definitely an aspect of listening.
Sucking in helium from a balloon gives humans a squeaky, high-pitch-sounding voice, because the gas, which is less dense than air, pushes the resonance frequencies of the vocal tract upwards, but doesn’t change the sound at its source. An analysis of the gibbon’s squeaky songs suggested that the same is true for these apes. Like humans, the origin of the sound of a gibbon’s call, which occurs in the larynx, is separate from the vocal tools used to modify it, the research showed. [Listen to Gibbon Calls]
What’s more, the analysis demonstrated gibbons have expert control over the tuning of their vocal cords and tract when singing — an ability that is important to the subtleties of human speech and is mastered by soprano singers.
“This is the first evidence that gibbons always sing using soprano techniques, a difficult [vocalization] ability for humans which is only mastered by professional opera singers,” Nishimura said. “This gives us a new appreciation of the evolution of speech in gibbons while revealing that the physiological foundation in human speech is not so unique.”
The study was published this week in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
3. Do you hate it when people complain? It turns out there’s a good reason: Listening to too much complaining is bad for your brain in multiple ways, according to Trevor Blake, a serial entrepreneur and author of Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life. In the book, he describes how neuroscientists have learned to measure brain activity when faced with various stimuli, including a long gripe session.
“The brain works more like a muscle than we thought,” Blake says. “So if you’re pinned in a corner for too long listening to someone being negative, you’re more likely to behave that way as well.”
Even worse, being exposed to too much complaining can actually make you dumb. Research shows that exposure to 30 minutes or more of negativity–including viewing such material on TV–actually peels away neurons in the brain’s hippocampus. “That’s the part of your brain you need for problem solving,” he says. “Basically, it turns your brain to mush.”
Share any research you come upon, straight and kooky.
The Listening Skills Version of the Invisible Gorilla Effect
The invisible gorilla decade-old experiment was designed to show that we’re not aware of as much as we might think. In the experiment volunteers watched a video of a group tossing a ball and were told to count the number of times the ball was tossed. About half the viewers failed to notice a gorilla (in a fake suit) walk through the group they were watching.
Science News (12/3/11, p 10) reported on an experiment that took the gorilla-suit concept and applied it to listening. Psychologist Polly Dalton of the University of London created a recording of two men talking as they prepared food and two women as they wrapped a gift. Volunteers wore headphones and listened to the recordings that simulated the four characters moving about the room as they talked. During the recording, and for 19 seconds, “gorilla man” repeated, “I’m a gorilla.”
A very high percentage of the volunteers who were told to follow the women’s conversation and a third of those who followed the men, didn’t hear gorilla man at all. Gorilla man’s voice passed closer to the men in the scene, which Dalton claims, accounts for some of the reasons the men might have detected the gorilla more often.
Dr. Dalton’s experiment provides us with more research about how unconscious we are about what is happening around us. No one would ever say the ball tossers nor the headphones users were unfocused, they were hyper-focused. Still they missed something crucial that was in their midst.
Think about the people who are killed crossing a road while texting. They get so embroiled in their activity that they fail to listen to their surroundings. Our job is to know when we need to block out extraneous information and sounds, and when we need to scan the environment to take it all in.
Be aware; there are “gorilla men” everywhere.
ASTD Conference and Listening Skills
Yesterday I attended the Expo of the ASTD (American Society for Training and Development) conference held in Denver. My reason for attending the Expo was to talk to vendors and look for book titles on listening.
My good friend and superb breakthrough thinker, Ann Herrmann Nehdi, President of Herrmann International (home of HBDI), sent me an Expo invitation. The last time I was at the conference was in 2004 when my book, COACHING C.L.U.E.S. came out and I spoke at the conference as well as autographed copies of the book. That Expo had aisles and aisles of books that were scarfed up by eager learners. This year there were about half the books, fewer categories, and not so many buyers.
If I’m going to create a “book” on listening, what would it cover, how would it look, what medium would it be in, who will want it? Certainly, I don’t want to end up developing something that would end up in an ever-shrinking market, the traditional book.
And then there were the vendors on the huge Expo floor. There was row-after-row of booths filled with people motivated to explain their wares, give me some tsatske, and scan my badge to collect my identity. While I knew how hard their jobs were, I only made eye contact with a few.
The vendors I talked to said they have modules or programs on listening. Most were Active Listening and included within Communication. Not one person was familiar with the content and only one found materials on it in his literature. I don’t want to run up Ladder of Inference and jump to conclusions that listening isn’t on their radar screen. It might be the Expo just wasn’t the right venue to hold a conversation about the topic.
What I am certain of is that attendees were drawn to hi-tech, glitzy, expensive, entertaining booths. One of the big guys gave away a Kindle an hour. People stood four deep at that booth, got caught up in the hype, chatted away with professional sales people. While, nearby, a smaller, traditional booth with candies or vanity pens to give away, was empty. In both cases, the vendors were selling their same, over-worn content, but re-packaged into different formats and claiming it was new information.
I’m glad I went to the Expo because I think it saved me a lot of time and changed my expectations. Whatever I undertake to bring listening skills to a broad audience, needs to be different content, format, and even media.
I need your help. What ideas do you have to suggest about a “book?” I’m definitely in the problem/mess finding stage of the creative problem solving process. Please advise me.
Part 2 of Notes from the International Listening Association Convention
Dr. Doyle Srader, Northwest Christian University, Eugene, Oregon
Performance Listening
Question: How is the act of listening sufficient to fulfill the duties of the listener and/or create relationship?
Some findings:
- There are three categories of performance listening:
- Listening toward relationship—calls relationship into being and establishes ties
- Listening toward leadership—enters without an agenda and allows interaction to establish meaning and directions
- Listening toward fairness—hear someone out much like in the judicial system where there is a hearing
- Measure of success is when followers are satisfied that the interaction has been effective and appropriate
- Communication is transactional and a co-created encounter
- Goal—use all three to be a credible listener so other person would say s/he’s been heard
Christopher Gearhart, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA
Sensory-processing Sensitivity
Question: Is the Highly Sensitive Person a Highly Sensitive Listener?
Some findings:
- No, highly sensitive people are easily distracted by stimuli and may not focus well as a listener
- fMRI shows more processing activity and less accuracy for a highly sensitive person
- fMRI shows longer and deeper processing activity for a less sensitive person
Sheila Bentley, Bentley Consulting; Graham Bodie, LSU; Jennifer Grau, Grau Interpersonal Communication
A Time I Felt Listened To
Question: Which techniques make a person felt listened to?
Some findings:
- People describe attributes first and behaviors second
- Sometimes the researcher had to ask, “What caused you to list that attribute to get the person to describe what the person did?
- Women square off more in an interaction while men take an open positioning
- 80% of all malpractice suits are caused by patient feeling “brushed off”
- An initial reaction determines degree of satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the entire interaction, even if the first person encountered is not the main interaction (e.g. person at the front desk makes a good/bad impression, and that colors every subsequent interaction, regardless of how others treat the person)
- Back-channel responses, those that are unconscious such as nodding or uttering “uh-huh” signal understanding
- The key attributes included in a Physician Listening Study:
- It is assumed the physician brings these attributes to the table:
Confidence, Empathetic, Humane, Personal, Forthright, Respectful, Thorough
Most important verbal behaviors: Answers questions, elaborates on topics being discussed instead of answering with short statements, asks questions, does not interrupt or change the subject
Non-verbal behaviors: Maintains appropriate eye contact, focuses body language and position, engages in appropriate composure, smiles/laughs
Random notes:
- Good listening gives you currency
- There are four stages of counseling/therapy
- engagement
- assessment in context
- insight
- action
- Babies borrow their sound from parents—that’s why many children have similar voices and speech patterns as their parents
- Listening is enhanced when the listener asks: Who/what am I as a listener in this situation?
- Anticipation of where the speaker is going next derails communication
- Metaphor: Listening is a cup. If it’s full with our own stuff, there’s no room for another’s.
There was a lot of validation of our work in Listening Impact, especially for Hear! Hear? Your Listening Portfolio ®
Active Listening might be a passé term: What would you nominate in its place?
My Broken Wrist and My Brain
The Glossy Black Cockatoos (c) Hugh Todd
We were on a bush walk in South Australia and came upon a sign that said the area is the habitat of the very rare (only about 260) glossy black cockatoo. If you saw that sign, what would you do? Right, haul out your binoculars, walk very quietly, and look around. We saw evidence of the seeds they feed on, so we were sure we’d spot the bird. No luck, so we continued on the hike, all the way down an embankment to the water, across river rocks to our destination, The Old Cannery.
It wasn’t much of a site, but the journey there was worth it. On our return trip, once again at the place the bird could be, I wondered what would happen if my partner became incapacitated. I certainly would not be able to get him out. Just then, as I was walking along, looking up for yet once more chance to see the magnificent bird, I tripped and fell hard onto roots and rocks.
My wrist and arm were sore, my hand was bleeding, and my pride severely damaged. Once we hiked out, I was able to drive the car, albeit uncomfortably. We changed our ferry reservation to earlier, and went home to ice, ibuprofen and a wrap. All that happened on a Friday.
We returned to Colorado the following Monday and I saw an orthopedist the next day. Yes, I had two small breaks and was fitted with a splint to immobilize my wrist.
Here’s the part where my brain comes in. On the trip I read a most fascinating book The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, MD. Most of the book is about brain plasticity, including how the brain creates new maps to deal with malfunctions and injuries. So, I decided to observe what was happening as my brain and body had to cope with my wrist.
First of all, I’m very left handed and the break is on that side. Beforehand I did very little with my right side, but it came to attention almost immediately. I drove to the ferry with my left hand on the gearshift (ouch) but my right arm, almost without my being aware, reached over to help. Since then, I observe myself becoming more and more ambidextrous: eating, brushing hair, closing car door, cooking, sorting laundry, typing (as fluid as ever with right and peck with left), and sleeping on my other side.
It might be wishful thinking, but I also notice my thoughts are more concrete and I’m more apt to remember details. I even found myself to a destination with logic rather than my GPS. Maybe Dr. Doidge’s writing is influencing me, or maybe what I’m experiencing is what he writes about. Whichever, I intend to keep using my right hand once the left is healed because I like having greater capacity.
Have you ever had a similar situation? What did you notice?
Do Women Talk More than Men? Recent Research
The findings from Queendom.com, a testing company, indicate:
- women and older age groups tend to be better listeners
- a fair amount of people continue to practice listening “faux pas” like interrupting, finishing other people’s sentences, and otherwise not giving someone their undivided attention
- women can tell when someone isn’t listening. They recognize that distant, glassy look, the misplaced “Uh huhs,” and fidgeting
“Most people will probably state that they’re pretty good listeners, but that’s because a lot of us think that listening is a passive process – that it just requires us to hear what others are saying,” explains Dr. Ilona Jerabek, president of the company. “Listening is active. We need to be mentally present, which means avoiding distractions, refrain from prematurely judging what the speaker is saying, or focusing on coming up with the perfect comment. We also need to be physically present – this means eye contact and open body language – and no fidgeting!”
Women seem to grasp this active listening concept slightly better than men do. Women are not only a little better at using body language to show that they are listening, they were also more likely to let a conversation flow rather than interrupt a speaker. Age comparisons reveal that older age groups are not only better listeners and good with body language, but also have longer attention span, are more likely to hear a person out, and less likely to get distracted.
Queendom’s data also reveals that while listening to others…
3% admitted that they don’t make eye contact.
12% will finish someone’s sentences.
16% will correct the speaker if they mispronounce a word.
17% have a tendency to interrupt.
19% will purposely divert or end conversations that don’t interest them.
20% admit that they perform other tasks at the same time (e.g. watch TV, cook).
23% fidget (play with hair, look at watch, tap feet, drum fingers).
27% make disapproving faces if they don’t agree with the speaker.
31% are thinking about how they will respond to the speaker.
40% admit that their mind wanders if they find the topic of conversation boring.
“Our study also showed that people with good listening skills had better grades in school and higher performance ratings at work. Listening takes effort, however, and a willingness to give our undivided focused to someone, which isn’t always easy.”
For further information about the study:
Ilona Jerabek, Ph.D., President PsychTests AIM Inc. http://testyourself.psychtests.com/ [email protected] tel: 514-745-3189
I Dare You!
If you’ve never gone to the Harvard Implicit site to take one of their many tests, you are missing an opportunity to learn about yourself, or at least, confirm what you already know or suspect.
All the tests I’ve seen are set up similarly, so after you take one or two, others might seem redundant. The power is not in the process, but the content; so ignore how the tests are set up, and pay attention to your responses.
Note that I got confused on one of the tests I took last night and I did not receive any results because there were too many mistakes. Make sure you understand the instructions before proceeding.
The first time I came across this site was when I attended a diversity conference and one of the speakers had us take one of the many tests to open our eyes about what kind and degree of biases we held. She made it clear that we all have prejudices and act on them, often unconsciously. The point of taking the test(s) was to develop awareness of our biases, manage our biases, and develop cultural competence.
The results were memorable and prompted the majority of attendees to want to talk about diversity at a much deeper level than when they walked in the door.
I know that there’s a strong correlation between our biases and listening. If, for any reason, conscious or unconscious, the speaker triggers a prejudice, that directly influences how attentive we are to that person. I wonder how seriously a listener who tells dumb blonde jokes takes the information delivered by a Marilyn Monroe look-alike?
Case in point. Many moons ago I ran a learning center at a college and we had a tutoring program. The faculty was very good at recruiting student tutors who met our criteria. A professor said he was sending over the top student in all of his science classes. About fifteen minutes later a beautiful young woman with curly blonde hair piled on top of her head, wearing knee-hi boots and rather seductive-looking clothing came to my desk.
As was customary, I asked how I could help her, I’m sure in a somewhat patronizing tone. As I started to reach for a tutoring request form, she introduced herself and said Professor Jennings suggested she come talk to me about becoming a tutor. Her favorite subject was physics, but she felt confident she could help students with most science subjects. She probably accounted for 25% of our tutoring load with great success for those students who looked past her looks and listened to her brilliance.
Let us know, if you are comfortable, what tests you took and how what you learned about yourself influences your listening.
Harvard University’s Implicit Association Test, which gauges prejudicial attitudes or beliefs about certain groups of people: