On listening

Recently, I have grown to accept two very different concepts of “input” that is accepted into the eyes/ears and perhaps the mind of a human. First, is hearing. Which is the more literal embodiment of acknowledging that noises/symbols/words are heard/seen, perhaps too in a language that is capable of being understood by the human. With this too, is remembering what was heard - to recall the noises/symbols received as input. Again, I would expect this to be most often done in a language in which the hear-er has the ability to create new noise/words of the same language, but it wouldn’t have to be.

The second concept is listening, which goes beyond mere hearing and/or recall and instead introduces understanding into the equation. Where it must be a language (ex: English), or sub-language(Ex: Math) understood by the hear-er, likely requiring a degree of fluency with said language.

I defend this difference by the existence of word popularized in primary schooling: “Active Listening”, or what I would refer to as truly listening. This now is apparently a seperate concept from a mere appearance of listening, or: hearing & remembering. The computer equivalent of this would be dumping the data contents of your RAM or L3 CPU cache, versus writing to a longer-term storage (HDD/SSD), where you can read, process, and mutate said data. Academia, which largely assesses comprehension of its theories and skills through bouts of ‘recall’-based testing suffers from selecting those with superior abilities of hearing & recall, over those who may have greater capacity to listen and understand, but cannot be discerned from those who best them in recall abilities.

The reason I share this, is to postulate that a significant and growing amount - the exact ratio or percentage of which is debatable - of information (as structured noise; language) spread between humans is merely heard, then remembered for yet another transmission, and not listened to. The difficulty in remedying this is that there is no apparent differnce between hearing and recalling and listening as a third-party, or even as a first-party:

“Was I listening? or did I just remember what I heard?”

Listening requires time, prior knowledge, and focus - most of which is monopolized by ‘other stuff’ that we are subservient to or distracted by. I include here even listening to one’s self. Inner impulses, thoughts, emotions, memories. I am wary of a faltering ability to listen both on an ‘intra-human’ and ‘inter-human’ scale, which has the compounding effect of creating deeper ignorance of our own faltering abilities.

The mere existence of the term “active listening” is aggrevating to me as it would imply that the default mode might be otherwise - or just not fucking listening. Point is: I say we suck at listening, to ourselves, to others, to nature, to history, to data, to whatever…