‘When did you hear that?’ – the relatinship between sound and our basic needs

I need to start with another apology – for another unscheduled gap. This will be the last post for 2015. Normal service will be resumed in the new year!

 

I chose the title for this part of the programme to emphasize the relationship between sound and time. That’s highlighted on the show by Michael Proulx and Julian Treasure. Here, though, I want to pick up on another relationship – between hearing and our basic needs, as set out in Abraham Maslow’s five-level hierarchy.

• Level: 1 Biological/physiological
• 2 Safety/security
• 3 Belongingness/love
• 4 Esteem (including self-esteem) and
• 5 Self-actualisation (fulfilment of potential).

 

In terms of biology/physiology, I mention on the show that evidence is growing of a strong link between hearing and health. When it comes to safety/security, our ears are the first line of defence against invisible threats. I ran across a powerful illustration of that a couple of weeks ago.

 

I was listening to the radio when I suddenly noticed an odd noise in the background – odd because it was out of place. Within a couple of seconds, I realised it must be a fire alarm. One of the presenters didn’t spot it, because she has significant hearing loss. Under normal circumstances, thanks to hearing aids and impressive lip-reading skills, you’d never know; but in this situation, it was just as well she was working with a fully hearing person.

 

Ok, so as far as I know, it was nothing serious – and if it had been, and she’d been working by herself, someone would have told her; but it’s not hard to imagine a situation where a deaf or hearing impaired person could be left behind in an emergency.

 

On Friday (4th December), in another studio, I was reminded of the part hearing plays in our higher level needs – from inclusion to fulfilment. This time, I was the presenter – interviewing Brendan Magill for The Wireless from Age UK.

 

This year, Brendan turned seventy – and celebrated fifty years of unbroken employment. His career has taken him from trainee computer programmer (in the early days of the technological revolution), to a ‘Business, Employment and Disability Consultant’ (since the mid-nineties); but the reason for talking about him here pre-dates all that. It goes back to something he said about his primary school education.

 

As a partially sighted five-year-old, he started at the ‘school for the deaf, dumb and blind’ in Belfast. (The word ‘dumb’ was dropped in 1956 – not a moment too soon!). He said the education ‘wasn’t bad’ and that overall it was: ‘A good experience, because I learnt to communicate with people who are deaf’.

 

Despite the fact that we live in a culture obsessed with the visual, hearing loss often creates more physical, psychological and social barriers than sight-loss. Why? Well, very simply because it makes it difficult or impossible to access the spoken word – which is a far more powerful communication tool than we tend to realise. It’s the fastest way to express complex ideas and emotions – and to tell the stories which bring us together and bind us together.

 

Yes, it’s descendant (written language) is generally quicker to consume, but it takes much longer to create. The average native English-speaker produces around a hundred and eighty words per minute, while even the most competent typist struggles to reach a hundred.

 

No, I’m not overlooking the vibrant culture developed by deaf people who sign; but that’s a response – a fantastically positive one – to being excluded from hearing society.

 

Since I started studying human communication, I’ve found it interesting that while ‘deaf culture’ is a definable entity, there’s no blind equivalent – for the simple reason that we don’t need one. Everything from music to conversation relies primarily on sound. Even things like cinema and video are accessible, on the whole, through the common language of sound in general – and speech in particular.

 

It’s fairly straightforward to translate vision into sound, but standard gestures etc aren’t up to reversing the process. Signing is a rich language in its own right – which too few of us master. While everyone who is able learns to speak, very few of us learn to sign. In the field of relationships, be they social or professional, it’s worth remembering that just because a person is hearing doesn’t mean they’re listening!

 

That’s one of the issues I’ll be looking at in the next programme, in January.

 

In the meantime, have a great Xmas and New Year. If you have any:

• Questions
• Comments or
• Communication issues you’d like to chat through…

 

…come and talk to me! All the contact details are on the website. I’m around til next Friday (18th December), then back on 4th January.

‘Why have the eyes had it for so long?’ – a fresh perspective on vision

In Programme 1 of this series, we took a general overview of the three dimentions of distance in communication –

• Physical
• Temporal and
• Human/social

 

and outlined some options for minimising obstacles and maximising opportunities.

 

This time, we’re looking more specifically at how the three kinds of distance interact with our senses. We’ll investigate:

• The link between sight and space
• The interplay between hearing and time
• The rough and the smooth of the relationship between touch and human/social connection
• What happens when our senses talk to one another and first
• The modern western obsession with all things visual.

 

We hear more from Julian Treasure of The Sound Agency, along with:

• David Howes of Concordia University
• Michael Proulx of The University of Bath and
• Ron Witt – a retired civil servant and mean ‘sound ball tennis’ player!

 

This whole series and everything around it is about challenging assumptions – stepping back to take a fresh look at beliefs which feel like facts and being prepared to acknowledge that they’re actually no more than opinions, – perhaps based on myth or misconception.

 

As so often happens in my work, this issue has recently cropped up in two totally unrelated projects – an audiobook about business and a radio interview about an intergenerational arts project. It features heavily in the second book by Ray Moore of Fluid Business Coaching which, like his first, we’re producing as an audiobook.

 

The first book was all about growing a business. In the second, the focus switches to growing a business owner – which involves, among many other things, recognising and dismantling the barriers created by limiting beliefs, like lack of confidence, in ourselves or others. It’s people who build organisations. So it follows that just as individual beliefs can stunt individual growth (personal and professional), group beliefs can – and will – limit the development of any group – including a business etc.

 

The idea we’re challenging in this programme has been accepted as ‘fact’ for years at every level, across the Western world. It’s that: ‘Sight is the primary human sense’.

 

In the first full section of the programme, David Howes puts that to the test by looking at it across all three dimentions of distance. In physical terms, he looks at cultures where other senses are prized more highly than sight. In the case of time, he takes us on a journey through the history of our own sensory culture , showing that the eyes haven’t always had it.

 

When it comes to human distance, he explains how connections were once made between a hierarchy of the senses and hierarchies of race and gender. David maintains that our view of vision, as the be all and end all of sensory experience, is just a matter of perspective. It’s a product of who we are because of where and when we are.

 

Although that doesn’t change the fact that in everyday Western life, it underpins everything from architecture to attitudes. That brings me to the second job where the topic has made its presence felt.

 

Last week, I recorded a radio interview with Sally Booth, an artist and freelance project manager with Extant, the UK’s leading performing arts company run by and for visually impaired people.

 

Our starting point was Jacques Lusseyran. Jacques was a teenager in Paris in WWII who became a resistance leader and lived to tell the tale. Like every resistance fighter, anywhere, at any time, his story is one of incredible courage; but Jacques had one clear advantage over his colleagues. He was blind. No, that isn’t a typo – I did mean ‘advantage’.

 

For quite some time, his lack of sight put him out of the frame when it came to the occupying forces’ suspicions. The assumption that a blind lad was no threat to anyone effectively meant he was invisible to the enemy. He was able to hide in plain sight. Then, as now, certain beliefs were as embedded as language, including that sight is inextricably linked with:

• Personal independence
• Social value
• Status – and even
• Intellect.

 

There isn’t much about Jacques on Google; I only managed to find nine results – but one made me want to laugh and scream simultaneously. It included a description of him as ‘blind but intelligent’ – as though the two were naturally mutually exclusive?! It reminded me of the kind of thing a member of the ‘I’m not racist, but …’ club might say about someone from another culture – ‘He’s black, but he’s a really nice bloke’!

 

Ok, so along with attitudes to race and sex, our attitudes to disability in general and sight in particular have progressed over the last seventy years – although not quite as far as we might like to think. I can tell you from personal experience that the sight of a white cane, or even a guide dog, still regularly prompts responses ranging from pity (for non-existent suffering) to amazement (at the boringly ordinary).

 

In the last month, I’ve been offered a spoon (instead of a knife in a restaurant and told how ‘brave’ I was to go to the theatre (no, it wasn’t a Halloween horror show – it was a musical! – and, in case you’re wondering, no, the performances really weren’t that bad!).

 

Now, I have to say, the people who trot out these clichés generally mean well. The offer of a spoon is, in their mind, an act of kindness; and the ‘compliment’ about being ‘amazing’ for doing something everyone else takes for granted is meant to show their admiration.

 

How do I break it to them that it’s actually deeply insulting – because what it really says is: ‘Wow! I didn’t think you could do normal stuff like that!’? The trouble is that these misguided assumptions have much broader implications than unintentional rudeness. Their reach goes further even than the barriers created for visually impaired people by low expectation, including low self-expectation. They impact every day on a significant proportion of fully-sighted people for whom effective communication across physical distance is difficult, even impossible, if they can’t see the person they’re interacting with.

 

Next time, we’ll look at the cost implications which flow from that, to individuals and organisations. Nothing I say here is meant to devalue sight or its important role in human communication; but as I’ll show you later in this programme, and in a future post, there’s more than one way to ‘see’. Knowing there are options and understanding the pros and cons of each is, after all, what intelligent communication is all about. Also, I’m not suggesting for one moment that sight (or the lack of it) is the only issue that creates these sorts of barriers.

 

Whenever we restrict ourselves to a one-dimentional view of anyone or anything, we risk setting up obstacles to and missing opportunities for effective interactions – whether the aim is problem-solving or relationship-building.

 

As I said in the last post, we can lose one another behind a whole variety of labels – there are probably at least as many possibilities as there are people! That was what Sally and I went on to talk about in our interview, which goes out this week. She’s currently managing ‘the ‘Spirit of Resistance’ project, which is inspired by a play about Jacques Lusseyran’s life. It aims to bring younger and older people with sight-loss together, to explore their experiences of resistance and resilience, whether it flows from vision, age – or any of the many other dimentions of their lives.

 

The participants will shape the project and the ultimate performance piece which will come out of it next June. The full interview airs as part of ‘Agenda’ (presented by ex-BBC newsman, Martin Lewis) on The Wireless from Age UK. The programme goes out at 6:00pm on Wednesday evening and 6:00AM on Saturday morning. There are two options for listening: You can find the station on DAB in London or Listen online. There will also be a podcast on iTunes after the show has gone out. For more about the ‘Spirit of Resistance’ project, check out Extant’s website.

 

In the next part of our show, we’re looking at the relationship between sight and physical space. So I’ll talk about that here next time. In the meantime, if you have any questions, comments or communication issues you want to chat through come and talk to me! All the details are on the website.