The Art of Listening

The Art of Listening

* I gave this talk at the recent Q-Commons event in Winston-Salem, NC.

We live in a culture of constant output. Whether it comes from social media feeds, billboards along the highway or signs above urinals in public places, our attention is targeted from our waking moments until we hit the pillow at the end of the day.

The President of the Marketing Firm Yankelovich, Jay Walker-Smith says we have moved from seeing the 500 ads per day typical of the 1970’s to now being exposed to around 5000 ads per day.

This is just the output coming at us from the marketing world. This doesn’t account for the endless scroll of tweets, Instagram and Facebook posts, blogs, campaigns and internet sites.

We live in a world inundated with information vying for our attention.  

So if there is this much output of information coming at us, there is also an increase in our intake of information. But the human brain, as marvelous as it is, can only hold so much information before it shuts down. You can ask my wife about this. She often jokes about the glazed look in my eye when the conversation has gone too long and I’m drifting off to someplace else in my head.

Angelika Dimoka, is the director of the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University. She conducted a study measuring people's brain activity while they were facing a problem with increasing complexity. She discovered that as people received more and more information, and as the problems they faced increased in complexity, initially their brain activity increased in the region of the brain responsible for making decisions and controlling emotions. But when the information load became too much, it was as though a breaker in the brain was triggered, and suddenly shut down. (the prefrontal cortex)

The people in her study began making worse and worse decisions as their brains were overloaded with too many choices and increasing information beyond their threshold of what they could take in.

So I’m thinking of this in terms of the cultural moment we live in and how the problems our generation faces appear to be increasing in complexity and how the influx of information being thrown at us is coming in an ever rapid succession. And my concern would be that if we aren’t intentional with our attention and if we don’t cultivate the art of listening, and slowing down, our ability to make wise decisions, to have empathy for others, to engage and respond to the world around us in a healthy and meaningful way will diminish.

We will devolve into reacting and emoting instead of responding in creative and constructive ways. Our decisions and our output will become careless and volatile.

So, we have to learn to curate our attention, and truly learn the art of listening, perhaps especially to those of differing opinion than our own. WE have to learn the art of Sabbath, of resting, of meditating before speaking. Otherwise, we will begin moving toward the numbness, reactionary blame shifting and the bad decision-making which comes from information overload.

I wonder if sometimes, to combat information overload, we compensate by only taking in what comes from our own camps or from those we think we agree with or understand.  Could it be that information overload actually leads to sectarianism and tribalism? I think its worth exploring. But if we only listen to those of our own tribes, we shield ourselves from the gift of the other and forfeit the growth which comes from hearing other perspectives because no one has it all together. We each see in part and prophesy in part the scripture says.

In The Breath & the Clay and on the Makers& Mystics Podcast which are part of the creative arts movement I’m stewarding, we model a value of engaging in dialogue with those of differing perspectives and not being afraid of associating with those of different persuasions than our own. In fact, we named our series of short talks “Perspectives” specifically to leave room for hearing from a variety of views.

What we give our attention to ultimately comes from what we value.  Even if we have to give our attention to things we don’t enjoy, usually there is a greater motive or value behind attending those things which compels us to engage. Either this is true or we are functioning on auto-pilot, taking in whatever comes our way with no thought about it.

There’s a verse in the book of James which seems applicable for this situation. James 1:19 says,

“Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath; for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God.”

In response to our information overload and the increasing complexity of our times, slowing down, curating our attention, learning the art of listening both to God and to each other and hopefully gaining God’s perspective on the matter is how we move forward. In any meaningful relationship, whether it is in marriage or parenting or in our church community, listening is the key component toward intimacy, understanding and ultimately growing together.