[Music] we are losing our listening we spend roughly sixty percent of our communication time listening but we're not very good at it we retain just twenty-five percent of what we here now not you not this talk but that is generally true let's define listening as making meaning from sound it's a mental process and it's a process of extraction we use some pretty cool techniques to do this one of them is pattern recognition so in a cocktail party like this if I say David Sarah pay attention someone who just SAT up we recognize patterns to distinguish
noise from signal and especially our name different thing is another technique we use if I left this pink noise on for more than a couple of minutes you would literally cease to hear it we listen to differences we discount sounds that remain the same and then there is a whole range of filters these filters take us from all sound down to what we pay attention to most people are entirely unconscious of these filters but they actually create our reality in a way because they tell us what we're paying attention to right now give you one
example of that intention is very important in sound in listening when I married my wife I promised her that I would listen to her every day as if for the first time now that's something I fall short of on a daily basis but it's a great intention to have in a relationship but that's not all sound places us in space and in time 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 of the surfaces and you're aware of
how many people are around you because of the micro noises you're receiving and sound places us in time as well because sound always has time embedded in it in fact I would suggest that our listening is the main way that we experience the flow of time from past to future so sonority is time and meaning a great quote I said at the beginning we're losing our listening why did I say that well there are a lot of reasons for this first of all we invented ways of recording first writing then audio recording and now video
recording as well the premium on accurate and careful listening had simply disappeared secondly the world is now so noisy with this company going on visually and auditorily it's just hard to listen in tiring to listen to flourish many people take refuge in headphones but they turn big public spaces like this shared soundscapes into millions of tiny little personal sound bubbles in this scenario nobody's listening to anybody with the coming in patients we don't want oratory anymore we want sound bites and the art of conversation is being replaced dangerously I think by personal broadcasting I don't
know how much listening there is in this conversation which is sadly very common especially in the UK we're becoming desensitized our media has to scream at us with these kind of headlines in order to get our attention and that means it's harder for us to pay attention to the quiet the subtle the understated this is a serious problem that we're losing our listening this is not trivial because listening is our access to understanding conscious listing always creates understanding and only without conscious listening can these things happen a world where we don't listen to each other
at all is a very scary place indeed so I'd like to share with you five simple exercises tools you can take away with you to improve your own conscious listening would you like that good the first one is silence 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 if you can't get absolute silence go for quiet that's absolutely fine second I call this the mixer so even if you're in a noisy environment like this and we or spend a
lot of time in places like this listen in the coffee bar to how many channels are found can I hear how many individual channels in that mix am i listening to you can do it in a beautiful place as well like a lake how many bird to my hearings where are they where are those ripples it's a great exercise for improving the quality of your listening third this exercise I call savoring and this is a beautiful exercise it's about enjoying mundane sounds list for example is my tumble dryer it's a wall one two three one
two three one two three I love it or just try this one on for size [Applause] Wow so mundane sounds can be really interesting if you pay attention i call that the hidden choir it's around us all the time the next exercise is probably the most important of all of these if you just take one thing away this is listening positions the idea that you can move your listening position to what's appropriate to what you're listening to this is playing with those filters remember I gave you those filters at the beginning it's starting to play
with them as levers to get conscious about them and to move to different places these are just some of the listening positions or scales of listening positions that you can use there are many have fun with that it's very exciting and finally an acronym you can use this in listening in communication if you're in any one of those roles and I think Matt probably is everybody who's listening to this talk the acronym is rasa which is the sanskrit word for juice or essence and Russa stands for receive which means pay attention to the person appreciate
making little noises like we okay summarize the words so is very important in communication and ask ask questions afterwards now sound is my passion it's my life I wrote a whole book about it so I live to listen that's too much to ask for most people 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 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 that's why we need to teach listening in our schools as a skill why is it not taught it's crazy 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 or at least capable of doing it now I don't know how to do that but this is Ted and I think the tech community is capable of anything so i invite you to connect with me connect
with each other is mission out 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 thank you for listening to me today [Applause]
