Thanks to our eyelids, we can, when our head hits the pillow, switch off our vision. Some of us also have “earlids.” When I remove my cochlear implant processor and hearing aid, I cannot hear my own voice. When my head hits the pillow, I hear only the sound of silence. As one who inhabits the worlds of both hearing and deafness, I am amazed by what you likely take for granted—the gift of hearing. And I experience the benefits, the misfortunes, and the humor of not-hearing. The wonder of hearing Hearing is our Cinderella sense—the underappreciated poor sister to vision, which receives information from millions of photoreceptors (compared to only 16,000 hearing-receptor hair cells) and which has 10 times the devoted brain area. Visual processing is akin to taking a house apart bit by bit, and then, through the work of millions of specialized workers, reassembling it—all in a nanosecond, resulting in motion, three dimensions, and color. Amazing. But hearing is amazing, too. Imagine creatures in another galaxy who could engage in mind-to-mind communication by vibrating air molecules to transmit thoughts. But this is what we do when chatting across the dinner table. With an astonishing skill we hardly comprehend, we convert our immaterial thoughts into vocal apparatus vibrations that shoot waves of air molecules through space. On impact with another’s eardrums, the vibrations—transmitted by the middle ear bones—trigger fluid waves down the cochlea, which bend its hair cell receptors like wheat swaying in the wind, triggering neural impulses to speed their way up the auditory nerve to our brain, which, wonder of wonders, somehow decodes meaning. I am wonderstruck at what is so ordinary, yet so extraordinary. I empathize with Sherlock Holmes: “As a rule, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be.” As Holmes appreciated, ordinary life “is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind . . . could invent.” And thus my urge, as Mary Oliver commends in her poem, “Sometimes,” to declare my astonishment: “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” svetikd/Getty Images The gifts of not-hearing Hearing is a godsend. Those jostling air molecules enable us to communicate, to detect emotion, to enjoy music, to sense danger. Yet there are also compensatory blessings to earlids that enable not-hearing. Not-hearing supports focused concentration. I am writing while on a long flight, whose 86-decibel sound (measured by my phone app) is surely noisy to my seatmates. But not to me, because I can dial down the sound. When trying to read, or to record your thoughts, you may find a noisy coffee shop or nearby hallway noise distracting, which is less a problem for those of us with hearing loss. Not-hearing supports sleep. Has your sleep been disturbed by hotel hallway noise or car horns? Not a problem for me. Not-hearing can minimize stress. Toxic noise jars most people’s nerves, which may increase stress for those in loud workplaces or in construction zones and airport neighborhoods. Not-hearing makes for less sensory overload. Not-hearing can heighten awareness of other senses. Thanks to sensory compensation, and with auditory cortex tissue available for other uses, those profoundly deaf may experience an enhancement of other senses, including vision and associated lipreading. The gaffes and humor of mishearing For the gifts of not-hearing, we hard-of-hearing people pay a large price. Without the benefit of today’s digital hearing instruments and cochlear implants, my mother—who bequeathed me with a mutation on gene WFS1 at the DFNA6/14/38 locus (the least of her gifts)—spent the last decade of her life in silence, cut off from fluent communication beyond written notes and rudimentary signing. In the world of 2025, I can, with my “earlids” open, hear, with ample volume. But much of my hearing is akin to an out-of-focus picture. This morning, my Heathrow departure gate made announcements other people seemingly understood—but were muffled and inaccessible to my hearing. In a crowded restaurant, we hearing-challenged folks might hear our tablemate saying, “The shiplefona,” while typical hearing people, aurally swimming amid a babble of voices, somehow manage to hear, “The ship left on a . . .” If you are a typical hearing person, I am awestruck by your ability to selectively isolate one voice among many: I do not comprehend how you do it. There is, however, more to hearing than meets the ear. Hearing involves both bottom-up sensory input and top-down interpretation, influenced by our expectations. Depending on the context, you may hear someone reporting on “the stuff he knows” or “the stuffy nose.” Did the newscaster just report on a “meteorologist” or “meaty urologist”? Was that couple’s relationship disrupted by their experience with “bad sects” or “bad sex”? With failure to hear and with mishearing come social gaffes and occasional laughs. “Not having understood what was said in a group,” my mother reminisced, “I would chime in and say the same thing someone else had just said—and everyone would laugh. I would be so embarrassed, I wanted to fall through the floor.” I can relate, after so many times missing the joke that all others have heard, or not understanding a student’s question, or not catching someone’s name, or repeating what someone has already said. Moreover, struggling to hear is just plain tiring. But it can also be hilarious. At one family gathering I was stunned to hear my sister say, “I had a picture of an autopsy blown up.” “You enlarged a picture of what?” I gasped. “Of an autumn scene.” Hearing Health editor Paula Bonillas gave her daughter castanets for Christmas . . . when really she had wished for a casting net. My hard-of-hearing physicist friend Paul Davies recalls visiting an Australian beach, where a woman emerged from the men’s bathroom he was approaching. “You had sex today?” she cheerfully seemed to ask. The stunned Davies wondered how to respond, before realizing that the women’s bathroom was broken, so she was explaining that the men’s bathroom was “Unisex today.” Much as Scots can tell one another Scottish jokes, those of us in the hearing loss community can tell in-jokes, such as about the three golfers with hearing loss: “It’s windy,” remarks one. “No, says the second, it’s Thursday.” “Me, too,” says the third. “Let’s go get a drink.” So, hearing is a gift. Not-hearing is sometimes also a gift, though more often a challenge, albeit occasionally with comic relief. But mostly hearing is a near-miracle. From a sender’s formless thoughts to air pressure waves to mechanical ear vibrations to fluid cochlear waves to decoded electrochemical impulses, the end result is a marvel: wireless mind-to-mind communication. Who could have imagined? As the Psalmist exclaimed, we are “wonderfully made.” David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind.   ... View more

What predicts a happy life? As I explained long ago in The Pursuit of Happiness, there are some things that I might have guessed would matter. But one’s age, gender, or race, for example, matter little. Money helps to a point—better to be able to afford life’s necessities and to feel control over one’s life than not. Yet ever-increasing wealth provides diminishing well-being returns. Moreover, the last half-century’s remarkable growth in average real income and purchases (albeit with rising inequality) us has left people a bit less happy. What does matter—what best predicts whether people report being “very happy”—is close, supportive relationships. We are, as Aristotle recognized, social animals. Our ancestral history has destined us to flourish with others. For our hunter-gatherer forebears, six hands were better than two. We therefore have what today’s social psychologists, notably Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary, call a “need to belong.” When supported by intimate friendships or a committed marriage, we are much likelier to declare ourselves “very happy.” When socially deprived—when exiled, ostracized, bereaved, or imprisoned in solitary confinement—we feel lonely and adrift. Social support matters. Friend number predicts happiness. “Happiness seems made to be shared,” noted the French dramatist Pierre Corneille. So it seems from answers to a question asked of Americans by the National Opinion Research Center: “Looking over the last six months, who are the people with whom you discussed matters important to you?” Compared with those who could name no such intimate, those who named five or more such friends were 60 percent more likely to feel “very happy.” And then a curious thing happened on the way into the twenty-first century. Our close face-to-face relationships have waned. We’re marrying later, and less often. We’re not just more often Bowling Alone, to use political scientist Robert Putnam’s famous metaphor, but also spending less time socializing with others. The American Time Use Survey reveals that we are (in minutes per day) hanging out together less. (To replace the diminished engagement, some have created interactive online AI friends.) Decreased face-to-face social connections are most striking among teens and young adults. As my Social Psychology text co-author Jean Twenge has amply documented, today’s teens are dating less, partying less, and being with friends less. Much less. They also have fewer friends. Their decreasing time with friends is not, as some have speculated, because they are working more or doing more homework. If anything, they’re employed less and doing less homework. But, you say, being alone needn’t mean being lonely. Sometimes we savor solitude. Moreover, texting and social media posting enable social connections. Although texting enables efficient connections, hearing others humanizes them. As Juliana Schroeder, Michael Kardas, and Nicholas Epley have found, people seem more thoughtful, competent, and likable when we hear, not just read, their voices. Moreover, teen and young adult depression, anxiety, suicide ideation, and loneliness have increased concurrently with the increasing home-bound solitude, and mainly for those spending long daily hours staring at social media screens rather than engaging with people in-person, face-to-face. In one of her informative Substack essays, Jean Twenge recently displayed Monitoring the Future survey responses of U.S. 13- to 18-year-olds, showing the percentage reporting depressive symptoms (with data from the depressing Covid years excluded). Our screens are not only a time suck from sleeping, reading, and schooling, but also from relationships. And consider other societal sources of our social malnutrition: At-home remote work. Many people love the convenience and lessened travel time and expense, but they come at the price of connecting with colleagues in the mailroom, over the coffee pot, and in office meetings. Take-out food, sometimes with contactless delivery. We love the convenience of take-out foods, albeit with less time leisurely dining out with friends. In the UK, the result has been a long-term decline in the number of people in pubs and nightclubs. Online shopping. We love the efficiency of one-click purchases and home delivery, even if putting out of business some shops where we once mingled with others and had chance conversations. Decreased attendance at churches, museums, and school sports. Fewer folks are joining others at worship places, museum galleries, and high school and small college sporting events. During the 1996–1997 college season, the NCAA Division III men’s basketball attendance at the three schools with the most attendance averaged 2467 fans per game; last year it was just 1397. I confess that I love being able to watch my school’s livestreamed out-of-town basketball games. But that convenience means that I’m less likely to enjoy being with fellow fans traveling together to cheer them on. The drains on our in-person, empathy-enabling relationships seem baked into modern life. Yet we are not helpless. We can reinvigorate the priority we give to close relationships. We can put down our phones and give conversational partners our focused attention. We can resolve to take the initiative to dine more often with friends, meet more often with colleagues, exchange confidences more often with family members. We can stick our head into coworkers’ work spaces. We can video-call relatives. We can establish sit-down family mealtimes. We can initiate micro-friendships—pleasing brief relationships with our baristas, seatmates, and ride-share drivers. Today’s digital world enriches our lives—but especially so when we retain a central place for face-to-face active listening and engagement. Sharing our lives in person with those who love and support us has two effects, observed the seventeenth-century sage Francis Bacon: “It redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in half.” David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. ... View more

You’ll be told that your hearing’s so murky and muddy, your case calls for special intensified study. They'll test you with noises from far and from near and you'll get a black mark for the ones you can’t hear. Then they’ll say, “My dear fellow, you’re deafer than most. But there’s hope, since you’re not quite as deaf as a post.” ~Dr. Seuss in You’re Only Old Once! Dr. Seuss could be talking to me. Although not part of the signing Deaf culture, I am—without my cochlear implant in one ear and hearing aid in the other—deaf. With the technology removed, I experience the sound of near silence. I cannot hear my wife from the adjacent pillow unless I put my “good” ear 4 inches from her mouth. Not quite as deaf as a post! My loss, which began as an unusual low frequency loss that made me a case of special intensified study, is the least of my mother’s gifts, which she inherited from her mother. Our shared experience is the result of a single gene defect, which a University of Iowa hearing geneticist identified for me during our years together on the advisory committee of NIH’s National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders: “You have DFNA6/14 hearing loss caused by a mutation in WFS1.” Yet I am really not so special, for there are some 38 million American, and 4 million Canadian, adults who experience some “trouble hearing,” or who have at least a 25 decibel loss in both ears. Hearing loss is one of the great invisible disabilities. In my workplace, I have many times experienced unintended exclusion—mostly unnoticed by others. In department meetings, I have missed much of others’ input. Attending lectures, I have sat trapped in the middle of an audience, missing most of the spoken word. Hearing worsens in auditoriums with distant ceiling speakers and in uncarpeted hard-surfaced rooms with reverberating sound. Facilities designers, take note! Had I been left out in such settings because of wheelchair inaccessibility, people would be aghast, and would engineer a remedy. Hearing loss, by contrast, is unseen and thus often unremedied. Moreover, Covid-era masking made things worse, both muffling sound and precluding natural lip reading. With thanks to cartoonist Dave Coverly (www.speedbump.com). Hearing loss does nevertheless have a few compensations. Normal-hearing folks have eyelids but no earlids. I have both. When working in a noisy coffee shop, I can turn down the sound distractions. Has your sleep been disturbed by hotel hallway noise? That’s no problem for people like me. Earlier this week, my wife’s sleep was disturbed by our bedroom’s phone ringing at 1:30 a.m. I was blissfully unaware. When hearing folks witness those with hearing loss not comprehending speech, they may misattribute the problem. During his Congressional testimony regarding possible Russian election interference, former special counsel Robert Mueller on 48 occasions asked to have questions repeated. Commentators, not appreciating that he is hearing-challenged, observed that he seemed “confused,” “uncertain,” and “forgetful.” And it was all so easily avoidable in one of three ways—each of which I have experienced as a godsend: A loudspeaker nearer his ears could have given him vastly clearer sound. Real-time captioning on a table screen, like the TV captioning we use at home, could have made the spoken words instantly clear. A hearing loop surrounding the room could have magnetically transmitted the voice from each microphone directly to the inexpensive telecoil sensor that comes with most modern hearing aids and cochlear implants. (See here, here, and here for more on hearing loops, which are now in thousands of auditoriums, worship places, and airports. Full disclosure: The first site is my own informational website, and the last describes our collective advocacy to bring this technology to all of the United States.) There are other ways to support people with hearing loss: Create quieter working and eating places, with materials that absorb reverberant sound. When beginning a talk, do not ask “Can everybody hear me?” and then put down the mic. (That question can elicit but one answer.) When offered a mic, use it, held close to the mouth: 4. When hosting a group meeting, cluster seating close together (to minimize speaker-to-listener distance). 5. Enable presenters to see their PowerPoint presentation in front of them, such as with a podium laptop--to minimize their turning their back to the audience when talking through their slides. Those of us with hearing loss can also act to give ourselves ear-opening experiences: We can be “out of the closet”: “I have hearing loss, so it would help me if we could be seated in a quiet corner [or] if we could turn the music down.” When attending talks, we can sit front and center. We can equip our ears with today’s “superfecta” digital hearing aids, offering both a Bluetooth link from smartphone to hearing aids and a telecoil for hearing loop reception. (Studies indicate that those with hearing loss who resist hearing aids—often because they are unaware of what they’re missing—are at increased risk for social isolation, depression, and eventual dementia.) We can harness other hearing technologies. For example, I love my hand-held directional remote mic, such as available here. When pointed at someone in a meeting or at a noisy reception, it zooms in on their voice. When connected to my laptop, my hearing aids become in-the-ear speakers. Hear ye! Hear ye! The happy news is that today’s technologies enable people like me to escape the deafness that caused Beethoven to lament living “like an exile” and to experience social encounters with “a hot terror.” I am also spared the isolation that plagued my deaf mother’s later years. No longer must our hearing be “so murky and muddy.” Hearing is not the only vehicle for communication. ASL is also a genuine language. But for those of us who have experienced hearing, how good it is. For we are, as Aristotle discerned, “the social animal.” We need to belong. We live in relationships with others—a feature of our human nature immediately recognized in the Old Testament creation story (“It is not good that the man should be alone”). As people who need people, we can therefore celebrate the wonder of hearing—of mind-to-mind communication via vibrating air molecules. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or his new essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.)   ... View more

My brain—and yours—is blessed with neuroplasticity. More than other species’ brains, ours can adapt by reorganizing after damage or by building new experience-based pathways. Although neuroplasticity is greatest in childhood, adult brains also change with experience. Master pianists, ballerinas, and jugglers have enlarged brain networks that manifest their acquired knowledge and skills. Brain plasticity is also at work in those of us who experience a new world of sound, enabled by a cochlear implant (CI). For many, the initial result of CI activation is underwhelming—squeaky high-pitched sounds rather than understood speech—followed by several months of gradually increasing voice comprehension as the brain adapts. Recalibrating voices. My immediate response to CI activation was happily more rewarding. “What is your middle name?” I heard the audiologist ask my previously deaf ear (reminding me of Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone words: “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you”). To be sure, her words were barely—and not always—discernible. And they came with the squeaky voice of the little girl who had seemingly occupied her body. But now my plastic brain had something to work on. The ENT surgeon attributed the high-pitched voice to implant’s disproportionately high-pitched stimulation. (The cochlear wire only reaches through about 1.5 of the cochlea’s 2.5 turns—its high-frequency region—beyond which the electrodes would need to be so close that they would interfere with each other.) But with time, I am assured, my brain will recalibrate, and already that's happening. Aural rehabilitation. As pianists, ballerinas, and jugglers can train their plastic brains, so too those experiencing disabilities can, to some extent, retrain their brains. By prescribing a stroke patient to use only the “bad” hand or leg—constraint-induced therapy, it’s called—dexterity will often increase. One person who had been partially paralyzed by a stroke gradually learned, by cleaning tables with their good hand restrained, to write again and even play tennis with the affected hand. Ditto for CI recipients, who are told to anticipate up to a year of gradually improving speech perception as their plastic brain adjusts to the new input. To assist that process, I am advised to dedicate time each day to watching captioned TV, or listening to speech with just the CI. If needed, recipients can also undergo word-recognition training. Happily, I seem not to need word training. Within the first week of receiving the CI’s input, some adaption was already evident, with speech becoming increasingly intelligible. Even with the hearing aid in my other ear replaced with an earplug, I can, in a quiet room, converse with someone via the CI alone. And with the enhanced binaural hearing I can again attend department meetings and chat with folks amid a coffee hour. I also seemingly benefit from a curious phenomenon of auditory selective attention. I can listen to what sounds like a) squeaky voices with my left, CI-assisted ear, b) normal voices with my right, hearing-aid assisted ear, or c) the improved hearing from both inputs combined—yet with normal voice perception predominating. Moreover, I am experiencing . . . A new world of sound. An unanticipated outcome of my CI activation has been various objects coming to life. My implant activation has caused my silent office clock to start audibly clicking the seconds. my congregation’s tepid singing to become more vibrant. our previously inaudible garbage disposal and car—both of which I have left running overnight—to make noticeable sound. (Not that you’ve ever wondered, but a running car, when left unattended for 10 hours, drinks about a quarter tank.) What strange CI powers are these . . . to cause previously silent objects to make sound! Honestly, however, I am awestruck by those of you with normal hearing. You swim amid an ocean of inescapable sound, yet somehow manage, without constant distraction, to filter and attend to pertinent sounds, such as one particular voice. You are amazing. But then for us all, hearing is a  wonder. Imagine a science fiction novel in which alien creatures transferred thoughts from one head to another by pulsating air molecules. That is us! As we converse, we are—in ways we don’t comprehend—converting what’s in our mind into vocal apparatus vibrations that send air molecules bumping through space, creating waves of compressed and expanded air. On reaching our recipient’s eardrums, the resulting vibrations jiggle the middle ear bones, triggering fluid waves down the adjacent cochlea. These bend the hair cell receptors, which trigger neural impulses up the auditory nerve to our brain—which somehow decodes the pulsations into meaning. From mind to air pressure waves to mechanical waves to fluid waves to electrochemical waves to mind, we communicate. Mind-to-mind communication via jostling air molecules: As the Psalmist exclaimed, we are “wonderfully made.” (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or his new essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) ... View more

We live wonder-full lives. How blessed I am to be tasked with reporting on those wonders, and, on most days, to learn something new. Last week’s reading brought news—previously unknown to me, and also to you?—of an intriguing phenomenon, numbsense. But first, some background. One stunning psychological science revelation concerns how much more we know than we know we know. We operate with two minds—one conscious, the other below the radar of our awareness. An illustration of this dual processing comes from brain-injured patients who, though consciously blind (unable to perceive their surroundings visually), act as if they see. Walking down a hall, they avoid an unseen chair. Asked to slip an envelope into a mail slot, they—despite being unable to see or describe the slot’s location and angle—can do so. These “blindsighted” individuals suggest that the brain’s “visual perception track” is—surprise!—distinct from its “visual action track.” Even normally sighted people, when their visual cortex is deactivated with magnetic stimulation, may display blindsight—by correctly guessing the nature of unseen objects. And now the week’s news: City University of New York researchers Tony Ro and Lua Koenig have also used magnetic stimulation to deactivate people’s sense of touch, leaving them unaware of whether or where someone has touched them. Yet, like some patients who have suffered sensory cortex damage, they can display a blindsight-like “numbsense.” They can guess the location of the unfelt touch. The big lesson of blindsight and numbsense: The unconscious mind sometimes knows what the conscious mind does not. Moreover, the out-of-sight mind is the bigger workhorse. Much as a cruise ship’s work mostly happens without its captain’s attention, so most of what sustains us is accomplished by our mind’s unseen workers below decks, without engaging our conscious mind’s attention. We are smarter than we know. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com; follow him on Twitter: @DavidGMyers.) ... View more

Endings matter. That’s the consistent lesson of experiments that track people’s memories of pain. Imagine yourself in one such experiment led by psychologist Daniel Kahneman (later a Nobel laureate for founding behavioral economics). You immerse a hand in painfully cold water for one minute. You then repeat the painful experience with the other hand, which gets an additional 30 seconds in not-quite-so-cold water, which allows your discomfort to diminish somewhat. Question: Which experience would you later recall as the more painful? Although the 90-second experience exposed you to more net pain, you would—if you were like the experiment’s participants—recall it as less painful. Moreover, you would choose to repeat it over the shorter experience that ended with greater pain. This curious phenomenon—that people discount the duration of a painful experience, and instead judge it by its ending (and peak) moments of pain—has been repeatedly confirmed. After a painful medical procedure or childbirth, people overlook the pain’s duration and instead recall what is most cognitively available—the peak and end moments. Recognizing that endings matter, some physicians have applied the finding by lengthening an uncomfortable experience with gradual lessening of the pain. How ironic: If a doctor or dentist, having completed a procedure, asks if you’d like to leave now or to bear a few more minutes of diminishing discomfort, there’s a case to be made for agreeing to the tapered hurt. Although the time scale of a medical procedure and a presidency differ, the Trump era will forever be remembered by its end—when, as the Senate and House convened to ratify the 2020 electoral votes, Trump encouraged his followers to flock to D.C. for a time that “Will be wild!”; reassured them that “We will stop the steal!”; admonished them that “You will never take back our country with weakness”; directed them to “Walk down to the Capitol”; and, after they had violently stormed the Capitol building and halted proceedings, took to Twitter to reiterate his claims of election fraud and tell the rioters “We love you. You’re very special.” The resulting insurrectionist assault on the nation’s democratic house—horrifying Republicans and Democrats alike—will surely color people’s future recollections of the Trump presidency and its enablers. Psychologically speaking, the assault was a double whammy that subjected America to peak pain at the presidency’s end. The vivid scenes of rampage will be imprinted in people’s minds, lingering as the most cognitively available basis for judging the Trump era, and for comparing it to the Biden era to follow. Endings matter. ... View more

At a May 26 Rose Garden press conference, President Trump asked a face-masked reporter: “Can you take it off, because I cannot hear you.” On this matter, I can empathize with our president. At a recent dental appointment, I could understand but half my hygienist’s and dentist’s spoken words. Despite being a person with hearing loss, I normally hear them both with ease, thanks to our proximity. But when muffled by their masks and face shields, their words became indistinct. One speech researcher explains that the thicker fabrics of many home-made masks are especially likely to “significantly block the airstream, diminishing the acoustic energy.” Although I wouldn’t have it otherwise—they and other caregivers are protecting their patients, and protecting themselves from their patients—masks do impede accessibility. More than we realize, we are all natural lip readers. Even a normal-hearing friend, visiting an ice cream shop, could not make out the masked clerk’s words: “Cup or cone”? Another acquaintance, during a hospital ER visit, reporting understanding only about half of what the masked nurses and doctors said to her. In the fully masked classrooms of my campus, colleagues tell me that, for example, “I have found myself asking students to repeat their questions.” Another colleague says “I am using my outside voice,” which takes more energy (and which other colleagues report leaves them drained). Another reports that “It is frustrating to continue to ask a student to repeat something and I fear it will shut down discussion and make most classes a lecture performance—in which case I might as well go completely online.” Another has, while the weather allows, taken his class outdoors where, socially distanced, they can see facial expressions and lip-read one another, mask-free. The essential lesson: There is more to hearing than meets the ears. What our eyes see influences what our brain hears. That phenomenon, which you can experience here, is called the McGurk effect. Moreover, thanks to our powers of instantly reading facial expressions, much of our communication is nonverbal. We share our emotions through our words but also through our smiles, our tight lips, our gaping mouths. Even our emojis vary the mouth: :- ( and :- ) . One colleague explains: “It adds a barrier that feels formal and inaccessible when you can't shake someone's hand, and then you can't smile at them to say ‘but I still want to get to know you.’” Cut off from facial expression, our communication is hampered. So is face recognition. With students’ faces masked, colleagues report becoming partially face-blind. They’re not only having more difficultly immediately knowing which student is speaking, but also recognizing their obscured faces: “I cannot call on a familiar student by name, because I can't tell who anyone is.” Add to this the depletion of normal emotional display and mimicry and the natural result will be weakened social bonds, including those between teacher and student, argues German psychiatrist and psychologist Manfred Spitzer. Given that masks—and also face shields in health care—are essential to controlling the pandemic, how can we salvage hearing accessibility in a masked world? Clear hearing is helpful to everyone—our minds wander less when little cognitive effort is required--but especially for those with hearing loss. In retail contexts, where a transaction occurs with a masked person behind a clear plastic screen, a simple solution can serve most people with hearing aids. Given a microphone and an installed hearing loop, a clerk’s voice will magnetically transmit to the telecoil sensor in most aids and all cochlear implants. As I can vouch, the system also works beautifully in other venues, including auditoriums, airports, and places of worship . With the mere push of a button, my hearing aids can become in-the-ear speakers that receive PA sound and customize it for my hearing needs. But what about classrooms, where campus face-mask mandates will require teachers and students to wear mutually protective masks—and in some cases (including the classrooms of my own campus) also to speak from behind a plastic barrier? What can schools and colleges do to enable hearing accessibility while also supporting public health? Admonish clarity. Schools can admonish instructors to be mindful that their audience is experiencing some muffling of sound, without supportive lip reading. Health care workers can likewise be coached to speak more deliberately and distinctly: “Your patients, especially your older patients, are having more trouble hearing you than you suppose.” That, alas, will be only a modestly effective solution, because we soon revert to our natural speaking styles. When one experimenter asked people to act as expressive or inhibited as possible while stating opinions, the naturally expressive people—even when feigning inhibition—were less inhibited than naturally inhibited people. And inexpressive people, when feigning expressiveness, were less expressive than naturally expressive folks. It’s hard to be, for any length of time, someone you’re not. Your speaking speed and style is, once your self-consciousness subsides, irrepressible. Transparent face masks. A second solution is to equip instructors with a face mask or shield that allows people to read lips and facial expressions. One example, used by some on my campus (such as the colleague below, at left) is the ClearMask. (An alternative, germ-filtering transparent Swiss surgical mask to be available in 2021 from hmcare.ch is shown at right.) Mindful of the face’s role in communication, one colleague is hoping, with appropriate permissions, to equip all his students with face shields. Two other colleagues have, however, told me of being bothered both by breathing issues with a clear mask, and also by the altered sound of their own voice (a familiar distraction to new hearing aid wearers). Define safe distance. A third solution is to specify a safe distance at which an instructor may lower the mask while lecturing. Imagine two very different classrooms. In a small seminar, colleges would surely mandate a professor's mask wearing when seated around a table with students. When lecturing while alone as a sage on the stage of a large auditorium, the professor would be sufficiently physically distanced to make a mask superfluous. In the gradations of classrooms in between, could colleges define a minimum safe distance at which a mask could be lowered while teaching? Add PA systems. A fourth solution is to add PA systems to intermediate-size rooms. An instructor’s head-mounted mic could transmit to a class through newly installed speakers. Live captioning. Google Meet’s captioning illustrates the potential for instant, accurate captioning that rivals the speed and precision of human captioner. Not only is it, therefore, a preferred video conferencing technology for accessibility (Zoom, take note), the visual information display aids anyone whose mind has momentarily wandered. Might classrooms be similarly equipped with open captioned displays of instructors’ remarks? Hearing loops. Finally, schools could employ hearing technology. Such ranges from personal assistive technology—in which an instructor wears a mic that transmits to individual hard-of-hearing students with special receivers—to class and auditorium hearing loops that transmit to most of today’s hearing aids and cochlear implants (as I illustrate here from my Hope College campus). We want to stay healthy. And we want to hear. Let those planning for in-person, under-the-pandemic instruction aim for both—a health-protecting accessibility. [February, 2021, P.S. For data on the face mask acoustic effects, see here and here. . . and stay tuned for data on the CDC-recommended double masks. (In a recent conversation, a double-masked colleague's comments were mostly indecipherable to me.) Note: high frequency consonants, which convey so much meaning, are most impaired by dense fabric masks and, alas, clear shield masks. Perhaps the new Ford partially clear N95 mask (see here) will work better for communication, as well as not fogging up? Also, have you, too, noticed athletic coaches dutifully wearing asks, but them pulling them down when needing to communicate--at the time they're most needed, albeit in recognition that masks impair hearing accessibility?] [6/5/2021 addendum: For new evidence regarding face mask acoustics and hearing see here.) (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

On 48 occasions during his recent testimony regarding Russian election interference, former special counsel Robert Mueller—seeming “confused,” “uncertain,” and “forgetful”—asked to have questions repeated. Was Mueller, who turns 75 this week, exhibiting, as so many pundits surmised, “cognitive aging” or perhaps even early signs of dementia? The chatter among those of us with hearing loss suggested a much simpler explanation: Robert Mueller is likely one of us. Might his struggle to hear suggest normal age-related hearing loss, exacerbated by his Vietnam combat? Among Americans 75 and older, half “have difficulty hearing,” reports the National Institute on Deafness and Other Hearing Disorders. For war veterans of Mueller’s age, some hearing loss is to be expected.   In response, we empathized. Struggling to hear, especially in important social situations, is stressful and tiring. It drains cognitive energy—energy that is then unavailable for quick processing and responding. Moreover, the challenge is compounded in a cavernous room with distant ceiling speakers that produce a verbal fog as sounds bounce off hard walls. Add to that fast-talking (time-constrained) questioners, some of whom were looking down at their script while speaking, impeding natural lip reading. Those of us with hearing loss dread, and avoid, such situations.   There is, admittedly, accumulating evidence (here and here) that hearing loss is associated with accelerated cognitive decline in later life. Compared with people with good hearing, those with hearing loss show declines in memory, attention, and learning about three years earlier—though less if they get hearing aids. But Robert Mueller’s slowness in understanding and processing questions seems explainable not only by his four dozen requests for having questions re-voiced, but likely also by his not completely hearing or perhaps mishearing other questions.   And it was all so easily avoidable in one of three ways—each of which I have experienced as a god-send: A table speaker 20 inches from his ears could have given him vastly clearer sound than what reached his ears after reverberating around the spacious room. Real-time captioning on a table screen, like the TV captioning we use at home, could have made the spoken words instantly clear. A room hearing loop could have magnetically transmitted the voice from each microphone directly to the inexpensive telecoil sensor that comes with most modern hearing aids. Other Capitol buildings—including the U.S. House and Senate main chambers and the U.S. Supreme Court chamber—now have hearing loops. Voila! With the mere push of a button (with no need to obtain extra equipment), we can hear deliciously clear sound. (See here, here, and here for more hearing loop information. Full disclosure: The first site is my own informational website, and the last describes our collective advocacy to bring this technology to all of the United States.)   Here ye! Hear ye! Let Robert Mueller’s struggling to hear remind our culture that hearing loss—the great invisible disability—is commonplace and, thanks to population aging and a life history of toxic noise, growing. And let us resolve to create a more hearing-friendly environment, from quieter restaurants to hearing-looped auditoriums, worship places, and airports.   (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

Climate change has arrived. Greenhouse gases are accumulating. The planet and its oceans are warming. Glaciers and Arctic ice are retreating. The seas are rising. Extreme weather is becoming ever costlier—in money and in lives. The warming Arctic and its wavier jet stream even help explain the recent polar vortex. If such threats came from a looming alien invasion, our response would be bipartisan and robust, notes Farhad Manjoo.   Even so, the U.S. government has pulled out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, plans to lift CO 2 restrictions on coal-generated power, weakened auto fuel-economy and emissions standards, cut NASA climate monitoring, increased off-shore oil and gas drilling, and reduced clean-energy research and development. So why, given the accumulating science, is the Trump administration apparently unconcerned about climate change as a weapon of mass destruction?   Surely the availability heuristic—the coloring of our judgments by mentally available events and images—is partly to blame. Climate change is imperceptibly slow, without a just noticeable difference from one month to the next. What’s cognitively more available is our recent local weather. Thus, hot days increase people’s beliefs in global warming—as Australians understand after their recent scorching hot summer. And cold weather decreases concern—as vividly illustrated when U.S. Senator James Inhofe, during a 2015 cold spell, ridiculed global warming claims by bringing a snowball to the U.S. Senate. (Is it really so hard to grasp the distinction between local weather and global climate? We do manage, when feeling cold air on opening our refrigerator, not to misjudge our whole-house temperature.)    (C-Span [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.) President Trump has echoed Inhofe with dozens of tweets that similarly generalize from local weather:     Such wisdom brings to mind my favorite Stephen Colbert tweet:   The availability heuristic’s upside is that extreme weather experiences, as well as climate science, are driving growing public concern. Drought-caused wildfires, floods, and brutal heat waves have a silver lining. After surviving Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey residents expressed increased environmentalism. And today, 74 percent of Americans say that the last five years’ extreme weather has influenced their climate change opinions.   Ergo, Americans by a 5-to-1 margin now agree that global warming is happening. By a 3-to-1 margin they believe it is human-caused. Seven in 10 now say that they are at least “somewhat worried” about climate change. And globally, across 26 countries, two-thirds of people see it as a “major threat” to their country. “The evidence the climate is changing is becoming so overwhelming people are seeing it in their regions and in their lives,” says the Obama science advisor, John Holdren. “We are really to the point where we’re seeing bodies in the street from severe flooding and severe wildfires.”   With vivid and mentally available weather tragedies occurring more often, more folks are noticing and caring. Last month, 3300 economists—including 27 Nobel laureates and all former Federal Reserve Board chairs—signed a consensus statement supporting a revenue-neutral carbon tax as the most effective climate change solution. Although the Green New Deal proposed by progressive Democrats may be more aspirational than achievable, its existence—together with the increasing climate concern of youth and young adults, and the growth in low-carbon energy sources—gives hope for a greener future.   (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life visit TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

I’m often asked: “What is your favorite introductory psych chapter?” I reply that, when starting to write my text, I presumed that Sensation-Perception would be the dullest topic. Instead, I’ve found it to be the most fascinating. I’m awestruck by the intricate process by which we take in information, transform it into nerve impulses, distribute it to different parts of our brain, and then reassemble that information into colorful sights, rich sounds, and evocative smells. Who could have imagined? We are, as the Psalmist said, “wonderfully made.”   And then there are the weird and wonderful perceptual phenomena, among which is our surprising blindness to things right in front of our eyes. In various demonstrations of inattentional blindness, people who are focused on a task (such as talking on a phone or counting the number of times black-shirted people pass a ball) often fail to notice someone sauntering through the scene—a woman with an umbrella, in one experiment, or even a person in a gorilla suit or a clown on a unicycle. As a Chinese tour guide wrote to a friend of mine (after people failed to notice something my friend had seen): This looking-without-seeing phenomenon illustrates a deep truth: Our attention is powerfully selective. Conscious awareness resides in one place at a time.   Selective inattention restrains other senses, too. Inattentional deafness is easily demonstrated with dichotic listening tasks. For example, if people are fed novel tunes into one ear, while focused on to-be-repeated-out-loud words fed into the other ear, they will later be unable to identify what tune they have heard. (Thanks to the mere exposure effect, they will, however, later like it best.) Or, in an acoustic replication of the famed invisible gorilla study, Polly Dalton and Nick Fraenkel found that people focusing on a conversation between two women (rather than on two men also talking) usually failed to notice one of the men repeatedly saying “I am a gorilla.”   Now, in a new British experiment, we also have evidence of inattentional numbness. Pickpockets have long understood that bumping into people makes them unlikely to notice a hand slipping into their pocket. Dalton (working with Sandra Murphy) experimented with this tactile inattention:  Sure enough, when distracted, their participants failed to notice an otherwise easily-noticed vibration to their hand.   Tactile inattention sometimes works to our benefit. I once, while driving to give a talk, experienced a painful sting in my eye (from a torn contact lens) . . . then experienced no pain while giving the talk . . . then felt the excruciating pain again on the drive home. In clinical settings, such as with patients receiving burn treatments, distraction can similarly make painful procedures tolerable. Pain is most keenly felt when attended to.   Another British experiment, by Charles Spence and Sophie Forster, demonstrated inattentional anosmia (your new word for the day?)—an inability to smell. When people focused on a cognitively demanding task, they became unlikely to notice a coffee scent in the room. So what’s next? Can we expect a demonstration of inattentional ageusia—inability to taste? (That’s my new word for the day.) Surely, given our powers of attention (and corresponding inattention), we should expect such.   Like a flashlight beam, our mind’s selective attention focuses at any moment on only a small slice of our experience—a phenomenon most drivers underestimate when distracted by phone texting or conversation. However, there’s good news: With our attention riveted on a task, we’re productive and even creative. Our attention is a wonderful gift, given to one thing at a time.   (For David Myers’ other weekly essays on psychological science and everyday life visit TalkPsych.com) ... View more