What is selective hearing?

What is selective hearing? 

Selective auditory attention, more commonly known as selective hearing, is when someone focuses their attention to a specific sound or voice source amongst other sources of noise. 

Selective hearing occurs in a variety of ways. Here’s a few examples: 

-Honing in on a conversation with someone during a loud party. 

-”Turning down” the crowd’s noise to hear an announcer at a sports game. 

-Not processing the sounds of everyday household noises, i.e. a cuckoo clock, a chirping smoke alarm or steam radiators. 

-Tuning out the radio while working. 

The reason why selective hearing is important to discuss is its place in the communication model. What’s the “thing” that shows up the most in the model? It’s NOISE! Noise lands between every transaction, and while noise can take shape in many forms, it’s certainly inclusive of sounds. I also want to talk about the misuse of the term. Before I understood it’s meaning, I believed that selective hearing was when someone picked out the information in the sender’s message for their own interpretation. This is known as “selective perception” and in no way should be interchangeably used. (And it's a very interesting topic for another day!) As mentioned in the post yesterday, these are two completely different topics (hearing and listening).

What are your thoughts on selective hearing? Have you been using it correctly this whole time? 😉