{"id":369,"date":"2012-11-13T19:20:33","date_gmt":"2012-11-13T19:20:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/?p=369"},"modified":"2012-11-13T19:20:33","modified_gmt":"2012-11-13T19:20:33","slug":"what-do-you-hear-right-now-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/what-do-you-hear-right-now-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"What do you Hear Right Now? Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>View Part 1 <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/2012\/11\/13\/what-do-you-hear-right-now-part-1\/\">Here<\/a><\/p>\n<p>There are different types of attention that use different parts of the brain.\u00a0 For instance hearing a loud noise that makes you jump, much like my cat knocking over my bedside lamp at three in the morning, is known as the \u201cstartle.\u201d\u00a0 Horowitz explains this as, \u201cA chain of 5 neurons from your ears to your spine take that noise and converts it into a defensive response in a mere tenth of a second, elevating your heart rate, hunching your shoulders, and making you cast around to see if whatever you heard is going to pounce and eat you.\u201d\u00a0 That sounds about right.\u00a0 I always feel my heart pumping through my chest, I start to search endlessly for the culprit (inevitably the cat), and start thinking about what I would do if there really was a burglar\/ninja\/Cloverfield monster in my living room.<\/p>\n<p>Luckily, this reaction requires very little to no brain power at all, but more complex attention styles do exists.\u00a0 A different part of the brain is used when you hear your name called from across a room, or an unexpected sound like a cat meow when you are in an office building.\u00a0 A third type of attention takes affect when you actually focus on something.\u00a0 Whether it\u2019s listening closely to a song\u2019s lyrics, or a TV\u2019s narration, or someone\u2019s anecdote, a separate pathway takes over.\u00a0 Seth explains, \u201c<em>Here, the signals are conveyed through a dorsal pathway in your cortex, part of the brain that does more computation, which lets you actively focus on what you\u2019re hearing and tune out sights and sounds that aren\u2019t as immediately important.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong><em>\u201cIn this case, your brain works like a set of noise-suppressing headphones, with the bottom-up pathways acting as a switch to interrupt if something more urgent \u2013 say, an airplane engine dropping through your bathroom ceiling \u2013 grabs your attention.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>So the basic rundown is that hearing is easy, listening is hard; especially with the high amount of distractions that our auditory system picks up and our brain deciphers every second.\u00a0 Seth reminds us to train our listening like we would any other skill. Don\u2019t listen to the same music, mix it up.\u00a0 Listen to our pets, they are trying to communicate.\u00a0 Listen to other people\u2019s voices, not the words, but the sounds, the emotion behind it.\u00a0 These are all things we can do to improve on our listening skills. Don\u2019t give them a reason to say \u201cYou never listen to me!\u201d again.<\/p>\n<p>I strongly recommend you read his full article linked at the start of mine, and perhaps buy <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/1608190900\">his book<\/a>.\u00a0 I know I am going to start reading it tonight.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\">\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>View Part 1 Here There are different types of attention [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[508],"tags":[402,800,392],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}