A Conscientious Listener
Jacob Schanck
Fayetteville Technical Community College
4/10/2016
A Conscientious Listener
To be a conscientious listener involves a great deal of attention as we often let the circumstances of our lives control our responses. Conscious listening involves a process of physical sound waves. The outer ear funnels sound waves hitting our tympanic membranes. The sound waves are then converted in an electrochemical process. From this point we construct meaning for the noise.
Depending on our interpersonal communicative health, we can interpret the noise in many different ways. Mentally we apply filters to the noise we hear. These are pattern recognition, we understand our names do to the frequency we have heard them said to us and accept it to be so. Differencing suppresses the noise we hear; otherwise known as selective hearing. Culture, language, values, beliefs, attitudes (Treasure, 2011) are filters we apply often times before we objectively and truly hear what noise is being received. Expectations can be dangerous in hearing as they solidify a preconceived notion as to what we think we are hearing from a person instead of what is actually being said. This I believe is the case often in the race struggles of our country. We also listen with our intentions. We may believe what we want to hear instead of what is actually being said.…show more content… The example given was that sound amplified while eating a crunchy snack made the snack seem that much crunchier.
Treasure pointed out that listening has become a very personal thing as we pull away from interpersonal connections in public places. We do this by wearing headphones that block out outside noise. In doing so we block out interpersonal connection. This has caused a desensitization and shorter tempers towards
