We spend roughly 60 percent of our communication time listening,
but we're not very good at it.
We retain just 25 percent of what we hear.
Now -- not you, not this talk,
(Laughter)
Let's define listening as making meaning from sound.
and it's a process of extraction.
We use some pretty cool techniques to do this.
One of them is pattern recognition.
(Crowd noises) So in a cocktail party like this,
if I say, "David, Sara, pay attention" -- some of you just sat up.
We recognize patterns to distinguish noise from signal,
Differencing is another technique we use.
If I left this pink noise on for more than a couple of minutes,
(Pink noise) 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.
I'll give you one example of that.
Intention is very important in sound, in listening.
I promised her I would listen to her every day
Now that's something I fall short of on a daily basis.
(Laughter)
But it's a great intention to have in a relationship.
(Laughter)
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 off the surfaces;
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
So, "Sonority is time and meaning" -- a great quote.
I said at the beginning, we're losing our listening.
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 has simply disappeared.
Secondly, the world is now so noisy,
(Noise) with this cacophony going on visually and auditorily,
Many people take refuge in headphones,
but they turn big, public spaces like this,
into millions of tiny, little personal sound bubbles.
In this scenario, nobody's listening to anybody.
We don't want oratory anymore; we want sound bites.
And the art of conversation is being replaced -- dangerously, I think --
I don't know how much listening there is in this conversation,
which is sadly very common, especially in the UK.
Our media have to scream at us with these kinds 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.
because listening is our access to understanding.
Conscious listening always creates understanding,
and only without conscious listening
A world where we don't listen to each other at all
So I'd like to share with you five simple exercises,
tools you can take away with you,
to improve your own conscious listening.
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."
(Noise) 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?
How many individual channels in that mix am I listening to?
You can do it in a beautiful place as well, like in a lake.
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.
This, for example, is my tumble dryer.
(Dryer)
It's a waltz -- one, two, three; one, two, three; one, two, three.
Or just try this one on for size.
Wow!
So, mundane sounds can be really interesting --
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?
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.
Have fun with that. It's very exciting.
You can use this in listening, in communication.
If you're in any one of those roles --
and I think that probably is everybody who's listening to this talk --
which is the Sanskrit word for "juice" or "essence."
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;
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
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,
and I think the TED community is capable of anything.
So I invite you to connect with me, connect with each other,
And let's get listening taught in schools,
and transform the world in one generation
to a conscious, listening world -- a world of connection,
Thank you for listening to me today.
(Applause)