Listening vs. Hearing
I think a running theme in this blog is me being aware of something but never considering it in detail. Obviously there’s a difference between listening and hearing but who takes the time to consider it? A media student scrounging for a blog post, that’s who. Right now I’m sitting in the library and while I’m listening to Simple Mind’s “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” I can still hear all the sounds of the library around me, although I’m not focusing on them.
A lot of the time I’ll be listening to a podcast while doing something else and ten minutes later I’ll realise I have literally no idea what was being spoken about, as I’m hearing it not listening. In lectures it can be a challenge (especially at 8:30am) it can be really hard to force oneself to listen rather than hear.
The lecture the other day (almost two weeks ago) made me question how much we can actually listen to at once. For some reason I thought this concept was different to multitasking, shocker: it isn’t. Many articles informed me the human brain can only actually focus on one thing at a time, so multitasking is really just switching between different tasks really quickly which ultimately lessens the quality of each completed task I guess.