The Art of Listening

Hello. When my mother was in her 50s, she got seriously ill. She had an operation that meant she lost half her jaw. Now, in that situation, the people she knew behaved in very different ways. One woman, who wasn't actually a friend of my mother, came to see her nearly every day. The door closed, and I could hear my mother talking to her for long stretches.

Some people who knew her very well stayed away, so they weren't there to hear what she had to say. As for me, I remember my conversations with my mother became... short and sharp and operational about what she needed and what I ought to get from the shops. I took instructions and I obeyed them.

Not long ago, I got an insight into some of the conversations my father had with her because I came to read something he wrote hours after she died. One moment in it tells me a lot about how they talked to each other during that period. My father writes that my mother saw that he was getting upset. She said to him, don't cry, it can't be helped. I was just unlucky.

it's just one line that comes towards the end of thirty years of conversations between them and i can hear in her words something of what she thinks of my father and quite a lot about her attitude to herself I think she's trying to be persuasive, trying to convince him. He hears that because elsewhere in the piece he talks of my mother's courage and how he doubts, if he had been in her shoes, that he could have been as brave as her.

I don't know for certain, but I think my mother could have been pretty sure that my father was listening to her, if not hanging on every word she was saying. So conversations are as much about what is spoken as about what is heard.

On word of mouth, we spend a lot of time looking at what he's said, but today we're concentrating on what he's heard. I'm talking to sociolinguist Dr. Haru Yamada, who's written a book called Kiku, The Japanese Art of Good Listening, and I'm delighted to see you.

say that Dr Yamada joins me today. Welcome to the program Haru. Thank you for having me here. Now can we begin with what got you so fascinated in the power of properly listening because you say in your book that listening helped you get better when you were very ill. What do you mean by that? I wonder, can you tell us the story? Yes. So I ended up in the ICU of a London hospital after I fell off a scooter.

And instead of my jaw breaking, my jaw unbuckled and the side that is connected to a part of your ear. That side ended up piercing my eardrum and backed up into my brain. So by the time I got to the hospital, I was... Not conscious. And at two surgeries later, I came around and the first thing I said was, oh, I need to go home. I've done the surgeries now. And they said, no, no, no, you cannot go home.

because you are connected to a ventilator. So I had a tracheostomy and I had two lung drains and something like nine IVs sticking in to my legs and my arms. And I said, what do I need to do to get better? And they said, well, you need to listen to all our medical advice. And so I did that. And much later, after I did finally get out, I realized that getting better wasn't actually just about listening to medical advice, that it was really about everything else that went on around the situation.

wasn't just sort of the cognitive intelligence that I thought listening was before. It was really also about health and relational health especially. So you're listening to everything and everybody around you because you're not actually speaking. because you can't, yes, because the tracheostomy is in there, which is underneath your vocal folds, stopping you speaking. So you mentioned the operational messages, but people are saying to you...

I hope you get better and things like that, saying nice things, comforting things, are they? All kinds of comforting things. Everywhere from my sister was bringing me videos of the children at home showing me that they were actually fine. So part of your... being well is not just knowing that you're well, but that the world is kind of continuing on as it was before when you were well.

My partner then was also breaking all kinds of rules to come and visit and make sure that I was following the medical advice. And the medical staff were also fabulous. They were telling me about all kinds of things. that I needed to do not just to get better, but also make me feel that I will actually be able to go home very soon.

By the way, when I was in that situation and they said that I was intubated and ventilated, I had no idea what they were talking about because when they said intubated, I thought they were mispronouncing incubated. Oh, no. And they were trying to keep me warm. I had no idea that... I'd had a tube down my throat, and when they said ventilated, I thought they just meant they left the windows open.

Seriously, I had no idea. Even the operational language actually went straight over my head. Literally, I had no idea what it meant. I'm sure it took me several rounds for that to kind of sink in and also the situation. I really thought I could just get up and go home. Now they've done the surgeries, but I was in no situation to go home. Now, this all has something to do with the Japanese word in the title of your book.

Kiku, you show how the meaning is exemplified by the way the word is written in Japanese. I can't read Japanese, so tell us about the way the word is written and what's important about it. Okay, so kiku is a word that means listen in Japanese. We have two characters that are pronounced exactly the same way, so kiku and kiku, but they're written in different ways, and they both mean listening.

But the first kind of listening is, I think, the way we normally think about listening. And it's written as a gate with an ear in the middle. So that kind of conjures up like a person listening in from the outside, gaining information on the inside. And the other character is written with a very big ear on the left-hand side and a stack of smaller characters on the right-hand side. And the stack of characters are the number 10, the number 4, and a heart.

So if you add up the characters, it's 14 hearts, and that's the kind of listening I call listening with 14 hearts. so this idea of listening with 14 hearts i mean that's quite an extraordinary idea i have to say let's go through a few of them now

Perhaps the first most obvious one is what you call informational listening. So we've mentioned it a bit with the hospital experience and me not getting it. You clearly better at it than me. So what is informational listening? So informational listening, as a linguist would tell you, starts when you hear acoustic sounds, sound waves travel through the air, our ears capture the sound, mechanical sounds are translated to electronic.

impulses in your inner ear and then those are further sent on into your auditory cortex, which is your brain, the hearing part of your brain. where we turn those sounds into what we understand as language. And everything else that happens after that is a little bit kind of like magic to us. We hear those sounds. And at that point, I think that's where the listening begins. because we have to decide to listen to the sounds that we've just heard. So we make that decision and that's our listening.

And this listening is very heavily dependent on language, words and facts and what we call content today. It's very message heavy. And there was a time in linguistics when some people, if I can use the word, reduced communication between people to this stimulus response information reception model, partly based on Morse code, I think. And they said, oh, well, that is the basic way in which we listen.

But you talk about many other kinds of listening. And this, I think, is where we bring in listening with heart, if you like. But how do we actually collect that information? There was at some point in that model that you gave us, there's a translation. isn't there, from I'll just make a noise, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Right. Well, that doesn't mean anything in English. But if I say the book is on the table, there's meaning. So now somewhere or another in the brain, the listening brain, I've got to turn what is really just another form of blah, blah, blah. It just happens to be the book is on the table. I've got to turn that into meaning.

So there's quite a lot going on in there, and it's not to do with the ear, it's to do with the brain, isn't it? Yes, yes, there is a lot going on. We can think of our listening as occurring in two speeds, fast and slow, and here I readily... borrow from Daniel Kahneman's thinking fast and thinking slow, because if we're listening, informationally listening, we're thinking about language. And so when we listen, we actually...

listen for a message. In other words, we're going back to our memory, remembering something we've heard before and associated with something, a cat. And when we hear cat, we remember what we've heard before. So a lot of the times when we're listening fast, say, for an announcement in a train station, we're looking for the platform number we need to get on the train. We're actually tracking the information we've already heard before and listening for it.

Whereas when we listen in conversation like this, it's much harder. So we need to listen slow. We need to give ourselves the time to listen slow. And we're learning new information.

We're kind of updating what we have heard before and checking against that, but also expanding it. So we're using our experience and we're also, some people use the word schema, that we have... schema in our heads so you mentioned the platforms we've already got the notion that trains come into platforms they've got numbers yes and uh we're going to apply that so we're listening out for platform we're listening out for number yes but chatting here if i

I suddenly threw into this something that was unfamiliar to you or you say something to me that's unfamiliar. I've got to slow it all down. Yes. Yes. But I'll still bring my experience to be honest, won't I? Yes. I haven't got anything else to bring, have I? Yes, yes. And all of that is lodged into your cortex. Yes. Now, I think what really interests you in the book is what you call the deep structure of listening.

As you say, we listen to and listen for what you call relational and cultural meanings. And I hope we can explore this. What do you mean by them? What sort of examples have you got for these relational and cultural meanings? I think you referred to old linguistic models, and we're familiar with talking about language as a kind of iceberg. And when we hear language, we hear the tip of it. So either we hear it or we see people moving around. That's part of language.

as well anything that's tangible or even what's in a handshake so all those things are the tip of the iceberg and beneath that iceberg we have social adjustments that we need to make and then Beneath that, we have culture. So culture to me are values. And then socially, we need a conduit to. express those values. And that to me is the social medium that we need to do that. And we get into a lot of trouble in that social area, which we're, I think, discovering now. So you were saying that

Linguistics before was very theoretical in a model and we only looked at the top part, which was the language. I think we're starting to discover the social part. politeness, for example. I think both the British and the Japanese consider that a very important way to communicate some of the things we care about in public. And we do it through politeness. And in that social interaction, we take politeness.

you know please nice to see you thanks very much for coming all those you would say I think I don't want to put words in your mouth it's as important how we hear that as it is as to how it's said. Yes. The listening part is our expectation that the social regulation is being met. So if I expect you to be polite to me and you aren't, by whatever...

I think that politeness is about. And that's the culture doing that. Yes, that's the culture beneath that's doing that. And then you aren't doing that. Then I would think that you were being impolite. Yes. Let me loop back to that conversation between my mother and father. I'll recap. So she was on the verge of dying and my mother says to my father, don't cry. It can't be helped. I was just unlucky.

What do you make of that? By saying it can't be helped, I'm hearing that she's saying something to my dad because she knows who my dad is. I think so. I think it's almost a kind of... a love message really it's saying that we're in this relational space together and When somebody isn't doing well and in hospital, you may actually lose the chance for future opportunities to be in that relational space. And she's looking after your father by saying, hey, it can't be helpful.

we're here, but there's no reason to be sad for me and for us and what we had in the space. So it is very deep. all a computer would see, or before in a theoretical model, you know, instruction reasons. It doesn't encapsulate it, does it? No, it doesn't.

Now, your book is brimming with categories of listening types or kinds of listening. Sadly, we won't have time to look at all of them. But let's just talk a bit about what you might call, I think you call it this, a kind of vocal fingerprint that people have.

You point out how nearly every one of us has a unique... way of speaking perhaps there's some twins i thought are an exception that's true but anyway i know some twins and really when i shut my eyes i really can't tell the difference but a crucial part of the uniqueness is how someone sounds and your point here

think is that when we're listening these uniquenesses if i can call it that are a crucial part of how we listen and this starts very very young what are they that when someone is talking what have we got Well, you're right to say it starts young because we already start hearing something like four months in utero. And then when we're born, we...

are already familiar with the voice of whomever's womb we were in, and we hear more through the air and not through the amniotic sac. But we start listening. We are most sensitive to volume, so we become familiar. with emotion and we hear pitch so the wavy stuff so the way we understand pitch the most in terms of emotion is somebody crying. And all these things are important, of course, for a baby because human babies are altricial, which means we need adults to survive, whereas some animals.

are pretty good. They start off on their own and they are ready to go and survive. So we need caregivers and we pay a lot of attention to them. We listen to them a lot. And the first things we recognize and still do as adults are volume and pitch. And then eventually we start into language and we can hear things that matter to the person by listening for the things they emphasize.

and add stress to while they're talking. Especially in English, we use emphasis to say, this is the stuff I really care about. Further down even, we look at intonation in English. We tend to have a rising intonation at the end of a sentence when we're asking a question. Are you okay? We have a rising intention. And then we do all kinds of playful things with it and we subvert it. Yes, and we can take, yeah, right, can't you? Where I can be totally straight, yeah, right. Or I can go, yeah, right.

Exactly. And two absolute opposite meanings just done with intonation. The words are the same. That's right. Grammar doesn't tell the story, does it? No, it doesn't. And I would say as a language teacher, learning a language is just as much about learning those. voice qualities as much as learning the language or the words or the grammar itself. And what's soft listening?

So soft listening is really what babies do and what we do sometimes. I think we forget about it over our lifetime. But soft listening is really listening for the voice. I guess, putting yourself in a beginner's mindset. So you're always learning. Soft listening is the kind of learning of not just what is being said, but what you're learning about the person.

So were you doing that in hospital? To start off with, you know, just this stuff was coming at you. To start off, I wasn't doing anything. But eventually, I think I discovered listening with 14 hearts, the idea of that. much later after I was able to kind of rationalize what had happened to me in hospital. But I must have been. I think everybody...

does do this subconsciously when they are trying to listen relationally. You know, what is somebody trying to say? Not just by their words, but what do they mean socially, but also... what are they saying culturally and what are they saying personally? Yes, you could hear whether they were being kind or less kind using the same words. Yes. Now, a key part of conversation is how both speakers and listeners...

to each other whether they believe in each other. Does the speaker think the listener is listening? Does the listener indicate that they're listening? and that they believe or agree with what the speaker is saying. So, you know, we do lots of nodding and mm's, so we indicate that we're listening, because it's really quite disconcerting, isn't it, if you're speaking at somebody who's just absolutely deadpan and not reacting.

at all so speakers in a funny way are listening to how the person opposite them is listening Yes. Listening and watching, I should say. Yes, we are always listening. Even when we're talking, we're listening. I call that demonstrated listening. Sometimes we think of listening as not enough. We want to see that you're listening. We want to hear that you're listening.

are talking about is one of the channels I call credibility listening. And we do a lot of credibility listening when we deal with strangers, people with whom we have weak ties with as opposed to strong ties. Strong ties are really important. because they're very restorative. You come back and you hope and know that these are the people that will listen to you. But actually...

Communicating with people with whom we have weak ties is really important too because that's part of our soft listening and our learning and we grow when we listen to things we don't know about. Therefore, that is restorative too. So that's part of our relational health. too but we do check each other out don't we meet strangers and my favorite image is that of a peacock

When their trains come up, they do this thing called the train rattle. So it's the sound of their plumes coming up that's attracting or is supposed to attract the female peahen. And the peahen then listens to that. and decides, like we do, to listen or not listen to it. And so it reminded me kind of what happens in a lot of these networking events. It's a little bit like what we do when we check out these strangers.

to see whether we actually want to have a conversation with them or we walk away. So I think credibility listening is a little bit about kind of sizing each other up and checking each other out, seeing if somebody's... worth listening to and making those decisions going forward. But then in close relationships, we're acutely aware.

of whether someone is listening or not. I mean, quite a lot of rows and squabbles take place because one person accuses the other of not listening. You know, you only have to glance down or perhaps glance at a phone, I guess, or even... an expression and one person might say to the other I don't think you're listening are you so we pick it up pretty quickly there's even an expression in my parents grandparents language Yiddish which is you say like a tomcat

Meaning that you're listening like a tomcat, via cotter, which, you know, as we know, tomcats are not very good at listening. I mean, to us at any rate, because you say come here and they ignore you or whatever. So we're very acutely aware of that. now. Personal relationships, aren't we? Just even an expression on the face. We definitely expect and want more from the people we're close to. And I always like to quote that famous poll that said that a third of American...

said their pets were better listeners than their husbands. So what a third of American women were wanting was not just the listening to the... operational language, but also just hanging in that space with them and really giving their partners their all, I guess. Yes, there's the famous example. I think two people, man and a woman, are driving along the motorway. And the woman says, are you hungry? And the guy says, nope.

And carries on driving. Yes. That actually means, I'm hungry, shall we stop? But he hasn't picked it up, or he's pretending he hasn't picked it up. I think that's the example. So he's listening, but not listening. Yes, I think that's a classic example. of what we used to say happened between men and women. This is, as you know, heavily contested now, but I think that in conversation, we tend to focus on one or the other. So either the main point of the conversation

conversation or what's going on in the background. And that causes, I think, a lot of conflict. My point, I think, there is just to be able to know that that's what's happening and that can go kind of a long way into dissipating the conflict that's happening. And what about taking turns in conversations? Or in fact, some people don't. They just talk at the same time. I mean, part of being able to listen...

is to be able to wait for the moment when it's okay to say something. And put it the other way, not good listening is just talking over somebody else. That's right. I think socially we have different pacings in different cultures. And that also gets us into a lot of trouble. So I think it's Deborah Tannen that talks about high involvement style. And that's the conversation where there are a lot of people seem like they're talking at the same time. It's a form of engagement for the people.

who know about that particular kind of style, but that can seem like rude and interrupting to people who don't know the style. Whereas on the other hand, people who have a low involvement style will have lots of silence.

is in lots of spaces. I come from one of those cultures. The Japanese culture is lots of spaces. We don't talk a lot. So when those two cultures come together, say, for example, a North American group and a Japanese group come together, other, in a business setting, for example, what often happens is the person who talks a lot will start talking a lot, and there will be lots of silences, and then there will be what sociologists call complementary schismogenesis.

meaning, oh, something's gone wrong here, and the person who talks a lot hears the silences and something they need to fill up. So they start talking more, and the silent people kind of back off and start talking even less and less in a kind of descending and worsening spiral that is often typical of those. Just tell me a little bit more about the Japanese situation there. The way you've described it is that there are silences. So in those silences...

I mean, you can listen to silence, after all, sound of silence, Paul Simon. Those silences, what do they mean? I think a Japanese person always thinks of silence as a pause. So already in their minds, it's a shorter period of time. It's a space, an opportunity to see whether the other person needs to say more. Instead of vying for talk, which is what happens in speaker-led cultures, in listener-led cultures, everybody vies to listen because it's an opportunity to see.

Has this person said enough? Has this person said enough? It's a very different way of coming to conversation. But it is a form of listening, though, isn't it? Yes, yes. Just the way you've described it, listening for more, see whether there is more. So it's a very pregnant silence. It's a very pregnant silence, and the ideal couple in a Japanese couple is set to... have which is like if somebody says ah they would know how to say but actually without even hearing any sound so

You know, no sounds, nothing said would be the ideal conversation, although, of course, that's not possible, but ideally speaking. Fascinating.

And in your experience, do you think adults listen to children or listen to teenagers? In your experience or perhaps in your research, do we listen to children? I think we want to, but I think that's the part of listening where we get kind of mired in our own experience of what listening was. So that's the part of listening where we were kind of told, you know, you need to listen. Yes, do as you're told part. And perhaps because of that.

We definitely need to listen to children more and listen to each other more across generations. And each group has something to learn from the other group. I think listening is a little bit like... exercise, you know, we kind of think it takes a lot of energy. So the 14 hearts is really energy. So yes, I think it's a more listening is a good thing. Well, we're nearing the end of the programme now, but before we leave you, one more thing to tell you listeners. The Open University.

have made a quiz where you can test your knowledge on idioms and find out why these funny clusters of words, such as you could think of some, have your cake and eat it. Why they're important to how we communicate. So why not go over to... BBC Radio 4 word of mouth page, and follow the links to The Open University, and you can take part. In the meantime, it's a big thanks to my guest today, Dr Haru Yamada. Many, many thanks. And to all you listeners out there who have no doubt been practising...

the art, at least I hope so, of deep listening over the course of this programme. So to see us out, Haru, I wonder, can you come up with any kind of motto, a little motto of any kind that we can say to ourselves to encourage us to listen better? Okay, so another Japanese image is The word for human is written as a person space. So I think when we're listening, that's what we're doing. We're making a space for the other person to say what they want to say. So a motto I would say is...

Go ahead and make that space. Tune in and adjust your channels. Dr. Haru Yamada, thanks very much indeed. Thank you.