Why Listening Works

Most of us can remember a moment, if we are honest, when we were entirely certain about why someone had acted as they did, and entirely wrong — when a word from someone standing elsewhere, who had grown up in that place, or spoke that language, or simply saw the matter from the other side of the table, revealed a whole region of the situation that had been invisible to us, and invisible not because we had failed to look but because, from where we stood, it could not be seen.

What is striking about such moments, once one begins to notice them, is how seldom thinking harder would have helped. The missing piece was not hidden somewhere in our own reasoning, waiting to be found with a little more effort; it was held by someone else, and it reached us only because they said it and we happened, that time, to be listening.

This book is an attempt to explain why that should be so, and why listening, which we tend to treat as a courtesy or a soft skill, turns out to be something closer to a necessity.

There is an idea, older than neuroscience and a good deal more respectable than its reputation, that the brain does not manufacture consciousness so much as narrow it — that we are less like producers of mind than like riverbanks, giving shape and direction to water we did not make. William James argued for it at Harvard in 1898, Henri Bergson built a philosophy upon it, and Aldous Huxley gave it the name by which most people now know it, the reducing valve; serious philosophers continue to defend versions of it today, in journals and with footnotes.

I find it compelling, and I have found it so for most of my adult life, in the quiet way one holds a thing that cannot be proved but will not quite be put down.

I want to be careful here, because the temptation to claim more than I know is exactly the kind of error this book is about. I cannot establish that the idea is true, and when I look closely at the evidence people cite for it, including the evidence I would most like to cite myself, I find that it usually has a more ordinary explanation. I lean toward it, and I cannot tell you that it is so.

The argument of this book, however, does not depend on it. Whether the brain filters mind or produces it, every serious account agrees on something smaller and more useful: that each of us receives only a portion of what is there, and that the shape of that portion is set by the body we were born into, the language we learned to think in, and the place and century that formed us — none of which we chose, and none of which we can see past on our own.

If that is so, then the rest of the picture must be somewhere, and a great deal of it, I have come to believe, is held by other people.

That is why listening works. It is a courtesy, certainly, but it is also the one means a partial creature has of seeing more than its own portion allows. The research on this is more recent than one might expect, and in places more surprising: people who are asked to imagine another person's point of view become no more accurate about that person, while people who are simply allowed to ask become measurably more so, and the person who is listened to well often comes away seeing more of their own situation than they did before the conversation began.

This is not a book of techniques, of which there are already good examples on the shelf. It is an attempt to say why those techniques work when they do, and why they so often fail when we mistake being shown the other side's views for the harder and quieter work of actually hearing another person.

I do not write as someone who has mastered any of this, and the book offers no method guaranteed to work. What it offers instead is an account, drawn from philosophy, from the sciences of mind and from the long testimony of the world's traditions, of why the person who sees differently from us is so often holding exactly what we lack. My hope is that by the time you finish it you will have someone particular in mind whose view you find you want to hear.