Joyful Sound

Hearing involves more than just our ears. We often take for granted that speaking and hearing is a complex skill that we have honed over time. It involves vision, attention, hearing and body language cues.

When people around us are all talking at the same time, like in crowds, we often rely on our vision to make sense of what is being said. If take time to observe, you would note that people look at the speaker’s face to understand speech in noise. By observing the body language we can also guess the unspoken meaning that is being conveyed. But during COVID-19 pandemic, the facemask removes the visual cues from the mouth and the face thus reducing the cues we are used to.

Hearing also involves our attention. When there is much noise around us, the speaker’s voice get drowned out. By paying attention and focusing on the speaker’s voice that we are familiar with, we find that we can understand better. Thus being familiar with the voice helps us to “hear” better.

While we think we hear with our ears, it is our brains that make sense of what is heard. This is seen especially when we are in a foreign country. We hear all that is spoken around us but we cannot understand a word because our brains cannot make sense of the incoming sounds. So experience is vital to understand speech to comprehend language.

Applying this to the new norm, we can improve hearing by changing the way we speak. When we speak slowly, we take time to pronounce each word more clearly. This would help the listener focus on our voice better. When we reduce the number of words per sentence we reduce the work load on our brains. This is known as reducing cognitive workload.

These are some steps we can take to help improve communication in the new norm.

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