If your partner or family member seems to only hear certain words, they may be suffering from selective hearing. This common complaint often leads to frustration and anger.
Selective listening is a cognitive function that involves the brain filtering out irrelevant sounds. It allows us to listen only to those conversations that are important to us, even in crowded social situations.
Causes
While some might use the term “selective hearing” in a joking manner, it’s a very real phenomenon that affects many people. Selective hearing happens when your brain filters out certain sounds and voices while focusing on others. Often, it’s because you’re not interested in the subject being discussed or don’t like the tone of the voice. Other times, it’s because of an underlying health issue like hearing loss.
Our auditory system and brain constantly receive, process, and communicate information from our environment. But because our brain has a limited capacity for processing, it isn’t possible to listen to every sound that is occurring around us. Therefore, selective hearing is our brain’s way of managing this overwhelming amount of information to ensure we can process the most relevant and important information.
The causes of selective hearing vary from person to person, but a few common factors include the desire to focus on a particular topic, the ability to multitask, and cognitive load. The desire to focus on a particular topic means that you’ll skim over the parts of the conversation that aren’t relevant to your understanding goal and only pay attention to those parts that are. This is similar to how we read when studying for a test: we’ll highlight the most important text and skip over the rest.
Cognitive load refers to how much mental energy is required for a task. When we have high cognitive loads, we tend to experience enhanced selective hearing as our brains struggle to prioritize the information being processed. This is also true of situations with a lot of background noise, where it can be difficult to distinguish one individual’s voice from another.
Children can also suffer from selective hearing, referred to as selective mutism. This is when a child ignores a parent’s questions, comments, or directives and instead only listens to what they find interesting. It can also be caused by anxiety and is more prevalent in immigrant children and those with speech and language delays.
Although selective hearing is a normal part of the human listening experience, it’s still not good for those around you. Friends and family members might become frustrated or angry when they feel ignored, but it’s crucial to remember that they care about you and want the best for your well-being. Their frustration might lead them to try to get you to schedule a hearing test, and that’s a good thing!
Prevalence
If you have a close friend or family member who seems to tune out your conversational cues at times, don’t worry; they’re not deliberately ignoring you. Instead, they may be suffering from selective hearing. Selective hearing is a natural human ability that allows us to focus on certain sounds and voices, while tuning out others. This is also known as selective auditory attention and is a normal part of human cognition.
It involves focusing on a desired object in an environment filled with distracting or irrelevant stimuli. This selection process is based on several different factors, including internal and external influences. For example, if you are driving to work in the morning and want to hear the traffic report, your brain will filter out the noise from outside your car and focus on the audio signal coming from the radio. You can think of it as a kind of mental highlighter highlighting the parts of a scene most relevant to your comprehension goal.
The phenomenon of selective hearing is thought to be driven by top-down processing, which uses cognitive abilities like memory and expectation to determine what information your brain processes. In addition, the spectrotemporal resolution of your auditory periphery is also important; this is how well you can differentiate sound features in your surroundings. People with mild to moderate hearing loss tend to have poorer spectrotemporal resolution, which makes them more susceptible to selective listening.
Understanding how selective hearing works is critical to ensuring we receive the most important messages in our lives. This understanding has also helped inspire advancements in audio technology, enabling devices like voice assistants and hearing aids to better filter out background noise and amplify speech.
However, when you rely too heavily on selective hearing in social situations, you may miss crucial information that could help you stay safe. It’s also not a great way to build rapport with people, as people will know when you are not truly listening to them. It can lead to misunderstandings and even missed warning signals.
Symptoms
When a friend, family member, or partner seems to ignore you, it can be frustrating and tempting to take this personally. However, this behavior is often due to selective hearing, not a lack of interest. Selective hearing is a normal brain process that allows the listener to zero in on one sound and tune out another. Multiple sounds inundate the brain throughout the day, so the brain prioritizes what it believes to be important and mutes distractions.
This is similar to focusing on one part of a television show while tuning out other parts. For instance, when you watch a cooking program on the Food Network, you may only hear about recipes that include ingredients you like cooking, such as pasta or chicken. You may also skip over information about the calorie content of these meals or the amount of fat and sodium in them.
In some cases, this is not intentional and is a result of a medical condition. A variety of disorders, such as ADHD and sensory processing issues, can cause delays in spoken word processing and distracting background noise. This can make it difficult to follow conversations in crowded or noisy environments and may lead to selective hearing.
Fortunately, there are ways to help someone who has selective hearing. This may involve repeating yourself, speaking clearly, and incorporating pauses in the conversation to give the listener time to process what has been said. It is also important to pay attention to non-verbal communication, as this conveys as much, if not more, than words.
While recent studies have shed new light on selective hearing, further research is needed to understand why it occurs and what it might indicate about the overall health of a person’s hearing. If you or a loved one notices that they are unable to follow conversations in crowded or noisy environments, it might be a sign that it is time for a hearing test.
The most important thing is to minimize your exposure to loud noise and wear earplugs or earmuffs when necessary. Taking care of your hearing is the best way to prevent selective hearing, and it can smooth over many rough patches that arise from this common problem.
Treatment
In normal hearing, our brain prioritizes the information it processes and filters out noise that is irrelevant. This allows us to focus on people we are interested in and tune out distractions. However, in some cases, the auditory information our brain receives can become too much, and individuals may experience problems with selective hearing. This is the basis of selective mutism, a condition in which patients cannot speak in specific situations or around certain people, such as strangers, school staff, distant family members, and crowded environments.
Selective hearing has nothing to do with a person’s hearing acuity but rather the way our brain processes and prioritizes sound. When our auditory systems are overwhelmed, they can become confused, and we can miss important information. This can lead to misunderstandings and miscommunication in interpersonal communication. It also leads to anxiety and depression in some individuals because they feel like they are being ignored.
When someone is talking to you, you should try to pay attention not only to their words but to the visual cues as well. For example, if you can see that they are smiling, this can help you stay engaged.
A lot of research has gone into understanding how the brain prioritizes sound, which has implications for a variety of conditions and disorders. One of these is the cognitive load theory, which states that our brains have a limited processing capacity and that our listening abilities are affected by how important a given sound is to our goals.
The other theory is the top-down processing model, which states that higher-order cognitive functions, such as memory and expectation, can influence our ability to filter out stimuli. People with these disorders have difficulty filtering out irrelevant sounds because their expectations and memories interfere with their brain’s natural ability to do so.
There are several treatments for selective mutism, which include family therapy and stimulus fading. According to a paper published in June 2021 in Frontiers in Psychology, stimulus fading has led to significant improvements in verbal communicative behavior in children with SM paired with behavioral techniques such as shaping and video self-modeling.