Grabbing Story by the Ears

A manifesto on listening

Most nights, around one or two in the morning, I wake up. Most nights, I stay awake until three or four. Sometimes I wake earlier, sometimes I fall back to sleep later. But I can't remember the last time I didn't wake up and just lie there for hours. It's not terrible, unless my hands are hurting, which they often do. I meditate. I listen to my cats snore. And I get a lot of thinking done. I solve problems. Sometimes I write, composing paragraphs as I lie there in the dark, or figuring out storylines. But, honestly, I would much, much rather be sleeping than doing any of these things.

A friend suggested that I could try having my Alexa read to me when I can't sleep. The idea bloomed immediately in my mind: I could feel what it would be like, to be snug and warm in the darkness, flanked by sleeping cats, listening to Bleak House, or Middlemarch, or Villette. The idea of meeting an old friend like that – for these novels are all dear old friends – of just being with them again, without having to work at it, without having to turn on the light, without having to hold a book in my aching hands, without having to use my tired eyes; the idea of floating on all that glorious language, of being carried by it, drifting, until sleep found me: This was an instantly powerful and compelling thought. Being read to in the dead of night: I could picture it turning my insomnia inside out, making the sleepless hours not only tolerable, but just possibly pleasurable. The whole idea struck me as deeply comforting, like being held by a voice, wrapped happily in words.

I don't think that's an accident.

I. SOUND IS TOUCH AT A DISTANCE

Of all our senses, hearing is unique. It is our first and arguably most sensitive sense: when we are in the womb, our ears are the only part of us that can access the outside world. We can't see that world, we can't smell, touch, or taste it. But we can hear it. At 18 weeks, a fetus begins to hear her mother’s heartbeat, her breath, her gurgling stomach, and even the blood flowing through her veins. This first sensory experience is an enormously intimate thing: to hear our mother’s heartbeat from within her womb is to feel her heart vibrating throughout our tiny bodies; to hear her voice is to be encompassed and caressed by it. Our first experiences of hearing, in other words, are also experiences of touch. Once we are out in the world, we retain a powerful, primal sensitivity to moments when we can feel sound in every cell of our bodies: this has much to do with our love of rhythm, not to mention subwoofers.

“Sound is touch at a distance,” wrote the poet Susan Stewart. And indeed, that is deeply, cellularly true. Our sense of touch develops alongside our sense of sound; the two senses are pegged together — the more sensitive and attuned the one, the more so the other. And this makes sense when we consider what sound actually is.

“It’s just waves of vibrating air,” writes author Jonah Lehrer; “That air travels through space and time, into my ear, waves of diffused, vibrating air, focused and channeled into my ear drum, which vibrates a few very small bones, and the little bones transmit the vibration into this salty sea, where the hairs are. And the hair cells are fascinating; they become active, literally bent by a wave. They bend like trees in a breeze.” The hair cells then convert vibration into an electrical signal and send it off along the eighth cranial nerve to the brain. The brain’s interpretation of all of that is what we call sound.

From https://www.schroederhearing.com/hearing-loss

Sound is a penetrating sensation: it quite literally enters our bodies. Once there, it moves us and moves through us. It reaches into our minds. Sound is, in the deepest sense, touching.

To lose our hearing, then, is to lose a critical component of our sense of touch. And this loss puts us at grave risk of becoming out of touch — not just with the world, but with ourselves. Hearing loss is linked to depression, loss of balance, and dementia: researchers at Johns Hopkins have found that even mild hearing loss doubles the odds of losing the mind. That risk goes up as hearing declines — people suffering from severe hearing loss develop dementia 500 percent more often than those whose hearing is fine.

Seventy percent of us would rather lose our hearing — or any other sense — than lose our vision. But we just may be wrong about that. Helen Keller, who knew what she was talking about, was adamant that hearing loss is far more devastating than loss of sight: “I am just as deaf as I am blind,” she said; nevertheless, “The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important than those of blindness. Deafness is a much worse misfortune. For it means the loss of the most vital stimulus—the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir, and keeps us in the intellectual company of man. Blindness separates us from things, but deafness separates us from people.”

For Keller, the tragedy of deafness lay in the loss of the sound of the human voice — specifically in the loss of the ability to apprehend ideas through speech. That’s worth thinking about. After all, we don’t need to hear to use language, nor do we need to hear for our thoughts to be set “astir.” Reading gives us silent access to both. Anyone who has ever read a brilliant treatise — or a thrilling novel, or a beautiful poem — knows how the written word can stir the mind.

Helen Keller lip reading through touch

Still, Keller argues, our need to be “in the intellectual company of man” is catastrophically depersonalized if we can’t hear. Her point intuits and insists upon an anatomical truth: speech allows us to touch each other’s minds with our thoughts. And the nature of that touch is entirely unique: no two voices are alike; each voice touches the mind in a way no other voice ever has, or ever will again.

To lose the experience of the human voice is thus to lose something vital, intimate, and profound about human connection. This makes sense, when we recall how primal hearing is to human development. And it has fascinating implications for how we communicate and make meaning — especially when it comes to telling stories.

III. THE EARS HAVE IT

In a recent study conducted at University College, London, researchers wanted to compare how we respond to visual storytelling versus strictly auditory storytelling. To do this, they had subjects listen to excerpts from novels that have been adapted for the screen, and they also had subjects watch clips of those same excerpts. In this way, they set out to compare the physiology of listening to stories to that of watching them.

Tracking subjects’ reported experience alongside biometric indicators such as heart rate, body temperature, and galvanic skin response, researchers measured participants’ engagement with everything from canonical literature (Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice; Charles Dickens' Great Expectations) to crime fiction (Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Thomas Harris' Silence of the Lambs) to thrillers and fantasy (Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code; George RR Martin's Game of Thrones).

What they found contradicts just about everything we think we know about how to capture an audience’s attention and keep it.

When subjects experienced a story solely through their ears, they responded much more powerfully on multiple biometric levels than they did to the visual versions. Subjects thought they were more responsive to the videos than to the audio versions, but their biometrics said otherwise — and as any marketing expert will tell you, biometrics are far better predictors of engagement (and hence political choices and economic behavior) than subjective impressions. Researchers concluded that stories are “more cognitively and emotionally engaging when presented in an auditory format.”

From Richardson, et al, “Measuring Narrative Engagement: The Heart Tells the Story. Available at: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2018/06/20/351148.full.pdf

In other words, plain old listening affects us far more deeply and dramatically than watching. Being read to gives us a far more intense and rewarding experience of story than watching the same story on the screen — even when we’re watching something as visually lush as Game of Thrones, or as bonechilling as Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter.

It makes perfect evolutionary sense that listening would affect us more than watching. After all, we evolved for story telling, but not for story seeing. Stories, originally, were meant to be heard. We were telling stories for thousands of years before we had writing, not to mention film; history, religion, myth, and legend — all were contained in a rich oral tradition of spoken stories. Meaning was made in the dance of attention between speaker and audience, created in the moment that the teller’s voice touched the listener’s mind.

At the same time, the fact that listening affects us more than watching is such an economically and politically inconvenient truth that it almost feels heretical to say it. Our culture is totally invested we are in visual stories — think how many billions are spent every year on films, TV series, YouTube and TikTok videos, commercial advertising, and so on, and think, too, of how many hours we spend each day consuming these things. We use visual stories not just to entertain, but also to persuade, to influence, to teach, to move people to buy things, and also to get them to buy into ideas. Certainly visual storytelling is much fancier, more expensive, more technologically complex than traditional storytelling. And so we assume that means visual stories are more powerful than stories that are simply and only heard. They are not.

III. LISTEN UP!

Does this mean there should be no movies? Is TV is pointless? No — although I think we can all agree that there are some movies that should never have been made, and that a lot of what’s on TV is indeed pointless. Personally, I absolutely love movies and TV. I have a standing date with them just about every evening. And it’s more than entertainment for me. It’s vocation: I work with writers to help them craft powerful stories for the screen, I’ve written for the screen myself, and I spend a huge amount of time studying how visual storytelling can move and change us — because it can, and it does. (For examples, see pretty much every post ever made on this substack.)

That said: if we are wired for story, we are also wired for close and careful listening, and the two are tightly wound together. It is through our ears — not our eyes — that we first encountered storytelling, as a species and also as babies. And it is thus through our ears that we first experienced story’s profound prosocial benefits — empathy training; coaching in how to grow, change, and connect with others; lessons in overcoming fear, navigating conflict, and recognizing Big Bad Wolves, even when they are dressed up to look like nice old ladies. Stories show us how to be human, they make being human meaningful — and, it turns out, they do this best when we receive them through a rich, textured human voice rather than a flat, flashing screen.

Ours is a culture that doesn’t listen much or well. We are also, as a culture, rapidly losing the ability to pay close, careful attention to anything or anyone. These things have a lot to do with why we are so divided and so unhappy — and, as Jonathan Haidt and others have argued, these troubles also owe much to our addiction to screens.

There is a call to action here, screaming to be heard.

What would happen if we spent more time listening to stories? If we put the phones down, turned the TV off, closed our eyes, and listened? What would happen if we read to one another — if we let ourselves be read to? Would we calm down? Become happier or more peaceful? Would we begin to rebuild our capacity to concentrate — and with it recover our interest in ideas, art, history, and pretty much everything else that makes life matter? Would we get better at understanding ourselves? More interested in truly understanding others? Would we become better at handling difference and disagreement? Would we be less politically hostile to one another? Would we get better at compromise? Collaboration? World peace?

My guess is YES. But we cannot know if we do not try.