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Hearing – the universal sense: Seth
Horowitz
This is an excerpt from the transcript of a conversation with Seth Horowitz. For the
full transcript, and the audio recording, visit www.howtobeheardbook.com and use
the password
consc1ous
.
Dr. Seth Horowitz is a former professor in the Department of
Neuroscience at Brown University. His work covers comparative and
human hearing, balance and sleep research, brain development, the
biology of hearing, the musical mind and neuroethology (the evolutionary
and comparative approach to the study of animal behaviour and its
underlying mechanistic control by the nervous system). He has applied
his research skills to real world applications of designed sound, ranging
from sleep enhancement to combating motion sickness. His work has
been covered in popular media including NPR’s
Hear and Now
and
All
Things Considered
, the
Boston Globe
, Wired.com and numerous other
online and print publications. His book
The Universal Sense: How
Hearing Shapes the Mind
has received critical acclaim by
Publisher’s
Weekly
and
Nature
. His New York Times article
The Science and Art of
Listening
was one of the most emailed articles in 2012.
Julian Treasure: Seth, your book was called “The Universal Sense” and
I’m fascinated by how you came to that title – why you feel that hearing is
the universal sense. Perhaps you could say a word about that.
Seth Horowitz: Well, it was really my first quest given to me as a graduate
student where my advisor was doing a series of lectures on animal senses
and said, “Go find some animal that doesn’t hear.” There are plenty of
animals that don’t see very well or don’t see at all, like blind cave fish.
There are plenty of animals with limited sense of touch, taste, smell, but
it turns out that there are no vertebrates, creatures with backbones, that
do not have a functional sense of hearing and vibration. Once I realised
that, it made complete sense because vibration is one of those forms of
energy that you’re going to find anywhere. Chemical senses need to be
close to the body, light will be dependent on time of day and
environment, but no matter where you go, there are always vibrations. A
truism about lifeforms is that if there is a source of information,
somebody will evolve to use it.
Julian Treasure: And of course, vibration ultimately is life. It’s
everything. Everything is vibrating at subatomic level right up to cellular
level. Vibration is all around and, I imagine, just self-preservation for
most species would dictate that they need to be very sensitive to
vibration.
Seth Horowitz: Of course, because even if you’re a visual species, like
humans, there’s going to be a time when you’re going to want to hear
something even if it’s behind you or it’s dark out. So, vibration and sound
act as our alarm system. What that has grown out of is the fact that
hearing and vibration detection are very fast sensory systems. We think
about something being as fast as sight or the speed of light being very
quick, but in biological terms hearing can be 20 to 100 times faster than
vision. This is because vision has to be processed through multiple stages.
It has to be synthesised to create an image; whereas, hearing is a very
mechanical sense. Our ear actually carries out many of the really critical
analyses even before it gets to our brain. Within the first .0051 of a
second you can tell where something is, what it is to some degree,
whether you should be afraid of it or whether you should be possibly
running towards it. Long before you can get any kind of conscious
response, your ears have already set up the very basic survival
parameters…
It hits the preconscious regions of the brain very early. That’s why sound
colours all other sensory and perceptual and emotional phenomena,
because it’s gotten in there long before anything else has driven. By the
time someone has said, “I want you to listen to me.” You have heard that
person’s voice, identified their gender, where they’re talking from, might
have some idea about their culture, their age, how important what they’re
saying is and their emotional status. That colours long before you actually
hear and understand the words that they’re saying.
Julian Treasure: Can you say a word about the difference between
hearing and listening?
Seth Horowitz: Hearing is a sensation. It goes on all the time, whether
you’re paying attention or not. Listening is hearing plus attention. Paying
attention is something that we do to increase our resolution on a task, but
what attention really is, is a way of filtering out everything but one
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