Why Does It Sound Different When People Read to Me and When People Are Having a Conversation
Key concepts
Psychology
Attention
Working retentiveness
Communication
Introduction
Have you ever told a friend or family member something but to later notice that he or she completely misunderstood yous—or never heard you at all? People ofttimes tell each other about important information that is not properly received, even when the conversation occurs in a quiet setting at close range. Why does this happen? In this activeness, you volition larn why advice can be so difficult by probing the psychology of listening. Y'all will also experience how much a uncomplicated spoken message can be distorted.
Background
The act of listening seems elementary enough: the ears register the sounds produced and the brain interprets them, bold the sounds achieve the ears and the listener knows the significant of the words. In the real world, notwithstanding, the situation is usually far more than complicated. Outset, to mentally process the message, the person to whom you are speaking has to exist paying attention. Non only may external distractions—a babe crying or a Goggle box on in the background—divert their minds away from the words, but their own thoughts might also similarly lead them off-target. Lost in thought, they are simply not hearing you.
Processing language takes a fair amount of idea. We apply a brusque-term mental sketch pad, so-chosen working retentivity, to hold each word and its meaning in mind long enough to combine it with others. If the meaning of any of the words is unclear, the task becomes harder.
In improver, people ofttimes don't express themselves conspicuously in the commencement place. They forget to include of import background or context, which can dramatically shape the meaning of words. They might mumble some words or simply choose the wrong word, i that does not truly reverberate what they hateful. In short, fifty-fifty when the other person'south brain is ready to listen, the information they need from a speaker is often not all at that place.
Materials
• Pencil or pen
• Paper
• Four or more friends or family unit members
• Stereo, Idiot box or other device that makes dissonance (optional)
Preparation
• Ask your participants to sit in a circle.
• Explain that you lot will exist whispering a statement to one person, who should then repeat it to the next person—and so on, until the message has made information technology effectually to everyone. Tell your participants to whisper the argument to their neighbor merely once.
• Using a pen or pencil, write downwardly a sentence that is at least 12 words long. For example: "Sam dashed chop-chop over to Jimmy's house to remind his friend about the English assignment."
• Memorize the sentence; then fold over the newspaper, hiding your piece of work. Don't show what y'all wrote.
Procedure
• Join your friends in the circle.
• Whisper the judgement you memorized to the person next to y'all so that just that person tin hear it.
• Ask your neighbor to whisper the statement to the adjacent person in the circumvolve.
• Observe the message make its style to every person in the group. Detect: What else is going on around y'all? Is everyone paying attending as well?
• When the last person has heard the statement, ask him or her to repeat it out loud.
• Write that sentence on your piece of newspaper.
• Read your original judgement to the grouping.
• Compare the two sentences. Are they dissimilar? Is the meaning of the distorted statement the same as the original or did it change in significant ways? If yous really wanted to say this to someone, how much would the differences thing?
• Ask the grouping if they could hear the statement clearly. Did people generally retrieve they got it correct? What does their reply suggest near communication and miscommunication?
• Extra: Write a simpler, shorter sentence and repeat the activity. Compare the earlier and afterwards sentences again. Are they more like this time? Why? Does your new issue suggest anything to you about how to communicate more effectively?
• Actress: Create another more complex argument like your original one. This time, let people say the judgement to their neighbor more than one time. Compare the before and afterward sentences over again. Are they more similar this time? Why? Does your new issue suggest anything to you lot about how to communicate more than finer?
• Actress: Try the same activity again with a new uncomplicated sentence, simply this time with a radio or TV on in the room. Exercise people wait more distracted? How close is the terminal judgement to the one you started out with? Practise y'all think having the background dissonance made it more hard to pay attending to and call back the sentence?
• Extra: Ask your group to talk about times in which they remember being misunderstood. What happened? What were the consequences? What do they remember went wrong in those cases? Talk about the best practices for skilful spoken language. Can you come up with v rules?
Observations and results
Did the statement you whispered change a lot during its journey? Very often the differences from the original are so great that people laugh. In real life, of form, miscommunication tin exist more than frustrating than funny. This frustration might come from the conventionalities that communication is straightforward, fifty-fifty though, equally we take learned in this activeness it is not.
The world is full of distractions, both external and internal. No 1 tin control all of them at any given moment. Moreover, everybody'south encephalon is different—in how it works and in the information and experiences information technology has collected. Thus, what you think you are saying may hateful something quite dissimilar to someone else—particularly if you start in the center of a thought, choose a wrong give-and-take or speak too quickly. Speakers brand one or more of these mistakes quite frequently—and worse, rarely realize when they practise.
Once you realize the obstacles to communication, you will be far more agreement when it fails—every bit well equally able to communicate more effectively past averting common errors. Think near what is going on at the moment: Does the other person appear to exist distracted? If you need to repeat yourself, don't be annoyed. Repetition, as you lot may take learned from the above activity, is a adept strategy for making sure yous are understood. Another tactic is simplicity. See if a bare-basic message will suffice, at least for now, but don't leave out background or critical details!
More to explore
Active Listening: The Telephone Game (pdf) from Peer Education
He Said, She Said from Scientific American Mind
Where Are the Talking Robots? from Scientific American MIND
How to Play Telephone from eHow
Your Retentiveness Is Like the Telephone Game from Northwestern University
Stress Relief Can Be the Key to Success in School from Scientific American Listen
Schools Add Workouts for Attention, Grit and Emotional Control from Scientific American MIND
Hands in the Air: How Gesturing Helps Us to Remember from Scientific American Listen
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bring-science-home-speaking-memory/
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