5 ways to listen better | Julian Treasure | TED

Name: 5 ways to listen better | Julian Treasure | TED
Duration: 7 min 45 s
Description: Shadow "5 ways to listen better | Julian Treasure | TED" sentence by sentence: 101 lines, beginner level, British accent, 8 min. Full transcript, hard words...

BeginnerBritish accentTED talk8 min

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contemplation
reverberation
communication
understanding
broadcasting
desensitized
relationship
conversation

Transcript: 101 sentences

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0:16 We are losing our listening.
0:19 We spend roughly 60 percent of our communication time listening, but we're not very good at it.
0:24 We retain just 25 percent of what we hear.
0:27 Now -- not you, not this talk, but that is generally true.
0:31 Let's define listening as making meaning from sound.
0:35 It's a mental process, and it's a process of extraction.
0:39 We use some pretty cool techniques to do this.
0:41 One of them is pattern recognition.
0:43 So in a cocktail party like this, if I say, "David, Sara, pay attention" -- some of you just sat up.
0:50 We recognize patterns to distinguish noise from signal, and especially our name.
0:55 Differencing is another technique we use.
0:58 If I left this pink noise on for more than a couple of minutes, you would literally cease to hear it.
1:03 We listen to differences; we discount sounds that remain the same.
1:08 And then there is a whole range of filters.
1:11 These filters take us from all sound down to what we pay attention to.
1:16 Most people are entirely unconscious of these filters.
1:20 But they actually create our reality in a way, because they tell us what we're paying attention to right now.
1:25 I'll give you one example of that.
1:27 Intention is very important in sound, in listening.
1:30 When I married my wife, I promised her I would listen to her every day as if for the first time.
1:37 Now that's something I fall short of on a daily basis.
1:42 But it's a great intention to have in a relationship.
1:46 But that's not all.
1:47 Sound places us in space and in time.
1:50 If you close your eyes right now in this room, you're aware of the size of the room from the reverberation and the bouncing of the sound off the surfaces; you're aware of how many people are around you,
2:01 because of the micro-noises you're receiving.
2:04 And sound places us in time as well, because sound always has time embedded in it.
2:10 In fact, I would suggest that our listening is the main way that we experience the flow of time from past to future.
2:17 So, "Sonority is time and meaning" -- a great quote.
2:20 I said at the beginning, we're losing our listening.
2:22 Why did I say that?
2:24 Well, there are a lot of reasons for this.
2:26 First of all, we invented ways of recording -- first writing, then audio recording and now video recording as well.
2:32 The premium on accurate and careful listening has simply disappeared.
2:37 Secondly, the world is now so noisy, with this cacophony going on visually and auditorily, it's just hard to listen; it's tiring to listen.
2:48 Many people take refuge in headphones, but they turn big, public spaces like this, shared soundscapes, into millions of tiny, little personal sound bubbles.
3:00 In this scenario, nobody's listening to anybody.
3:03 We're becoming impatient.
3:05 We don't want oratory anymore; we want sound bites.
3:08 And the art of conversation is being replaced -- dangerously, I think -- by personal broadcasting.
3:15 I don't know how much listening there is in this conversation, which is sadly very common, especially in the UK.
3:22 We're becoming desensitized.
3:23 Our media have to scream at us with these kinds of headlines in order to get our attention.
3:29 And that means it's harder for us to pay attention to the quiet, the subtle, the understated.
3:36 This is a serious problem that we're losing our listening.
3:39 This is not trivial, because listening is our access to understanding.
3:44 Conscious listening always creates understanding, and only without conscious listening can these things happen.
3:52 A world where we don't listen to each other at all is a very scary place indeed.
3:59 So I'd like to share with you five simple exercises, tools you can take away with you, to improve your own conscious listening.
4:06 Would you like that?
4:07 Audience: Yes!
4:09 Good.
4:09 The first one is silence.
4:12 Just three minutes a day of silence is a wonderful exercise to reset your ears and to recalibrate, so that you can hear the quiet again.
4:20 If you can't get absolute silence, go for quiet, that's absolutely fine.
4:25 Second, I call this "the mixer."
4:28 So even if you're in a noisy environment like this -- and we all spend a lot of time in places like this -- listen in the coffee bar to how many channels of sound can I hear?
4:38 How many individual channels in that mix am I listening to?
4:41 You can do it in a beautiful place as well, like in a lake.
4:44 How many birds am I hearing?
4:46 Where are they?
4:47 Where are those ripples?
4:48 It's a great exercise for improving the quality of your listening.
4:52 Third, this exercise I call "savoring," and this is a beautiful exercise.
4:56 It's about enjoying mundane sounds.
4:58 This, for example, is my tumble dryer.
5:03 It's a waltz -- one, two, three; one, two, three; one, two, three.
5:07 I love it!
5:08 Or just try this one on for size.
5:20 Wow!
5:21 So, mundane sounds can be really interesting -- if you pay attention.
5:25 I call that the "hidden choir" -- it's around us all the time.
5:28 The next exercise is probably the most important of all of these, if you just take one thing away.
5:34 This is listening positions -- the idea that you can move your listening position to what's appropriate to what you're listening to.
5:42 This is playing with those filters.
5:44 Remember I gave you those filters?
5:45 It's starting to play with them as levers, to get conscious about them and to move to different places.
5:50 These are just some of the listening positions, or scales of listening positions, that you can use.
5:55 There are many.
5:56 Have fun with that.
5:57 It's very exciting.
5:59 And finally, an acronym.
6:01 You can use this in listening, in communication.
6:04 If you're in any one of those roles -- and I think that probably is everybody who's listening to this talk -- the acronym is RASA, which is the Sanskrit word for "juice" or "essence."
6:15 And RASA stands for "Receive," which means pay attention to the person; "Appreciate," making little noises like "hmm," "oh," "OK"; "Summarize" -- the word "so" is very important in communication;
6:27 and "Ask," ask questions afterwards.
6:30 Now sound is my passion, it's my life.
6:33 I wrote a whole book about it.
6:34 So I live to listen.
6:35 That's too much to ask for most people.
6:38 But I believe that every human being needs to listen consciously in order to live fully -- connected in space and in time to the physical world around us,
6:48 connected in understanding to each other, not to mention spiritually connected, because every spiritual path I know of has listening and contemplation at its heart.
6:58 That's why we need to teach listening in our schools as a skill.
7:04 Why is it not taught?
7:05 It's crazy.
7:06 And if we can teach listening in our schools, we can take our listening off that slippery slope to that dangerous, scary world that I talked about, and move it to a place where everybody is consciously listening all the time,
7:18 or at least capable of doing it.
7:20 Now, I don't know how to do that, but this is TED, and I think the TED community is capable of anything.
7:27 So I invite you to connect with me, connect with each other, take this mission out.
7:31 And let's get listening taught in schools, and transform the world in one generation to a conscious, listening world -- a world of connection, a world of understanding and a world of peace.
7:41 Thank you for listening to me today.

5 ways to listen better | Julian Treasure | TED

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Transcript: 101 sentences

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