Listening

Listening

Transcript for Listening (full episode)

From Stanford University and KZSU, this is the Stanford Storytelling Project.

We are naïve when we think that what we write about should cause immediate changes.

It's the same thing if you listen to one note.

And then if we put on the sustain pedal.

Welcome to State of the Human.

It's the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

Each week on our show, we bring you stories that tell you something new about a common human experience.

And then you'll hear all of these other things.

This week, we're putting an ear to listening and asking what happens when we listen to the unexpected.

I remember one of our first dates.

We were walking down the road.

She's like, that's an F.

I was like, what are you talking about?

It's like the bus is an F.

It's like, oh my god, she's got perfect pitch.

She's wonderful.

Yeah, I think my mind was elsewhere at that stage.

First, it's a story about a man in a woman who listened to the world very differently.

Once was a woman who lived in the woods.

A wheel, a wheel, a while, yeah.

Once was a woman who lived in the woods.

My name is Eoin Callery.

I'm a DMA in composition, which is studying for a doctorate in musical arts at Stanford University.

And I'm a second year.

I can't hear pitches.

It's my confession as a musician.

My name is D'or Seifer.

Having perfect pitch.

Once you hear a pitch, you automatically zero in on it.

Your brain hears it.

You recognize it.

It's kind of satisfying, but at the same time, your attention will be completely diverted.

And that does happen to me, where I'll be in the middle of a conversation, but the door just slammed and the pitch was a B, so, you know, oh, that was a B.

Okay, now let's focus back on, you know, whatever it is.

Electrical lights have a pitch.

Usually it's like a B-flat.

Sometimes water has a pitch.

Whistling has a pitch.

Almost a lot of things have pitches.

Crackling of keys, sound of key turning in a lock, the hinges on a door, door slamming.

Yeah, and then when I met Eoin, he said, yeah, some sounds don't have pitches.

Because I used to try and figure out all the pitches all the time and kind of think that I failed for some reason when footsteps didn't make a pitch, but they don't.

I would say that a pitch, for me, is the tiniest possible tone.

It's like trying to describe, like I have a friend who's an artist, but he's colorblind, like he doesn't see blue.

So all of his pictures are really strange, and like he has no idea what blue is.

Learning that I have perfect pitch, you know, I must have had it before because people say that it's innate, that you're born with it.

When I was six or seven, I started playing piano for the first time.

And my piano teacher was a musicologist, and my listening was very centered around classical music mostly, and sort of what's pretty, what's correct.

Somewhere around 11th grade, I stopped agreeing to listen that way, because at that point, I also stopped being a musician.

Pitch, it doesn't work in my ears.

I don't know what impact it's had on the relationship, other than it makes me think about what I hear, and I think it makes her think about what she hears.

The fact that it turns out we all perceive things differently, and the fact that I know that the person who I'm with and the person who I love perceives the world completely different to me, but isn't some weird alien that's going to threaten the order of everything.

I think that, for me, teaches me something about humanity, that we make weird value judgments sometimes, and I don't know why.

Thanks to Eoin Callery and D'or Seifer for sharing their story with us.

Natasha Ruck and Kristi Hartman put that story together.

Well, now we're officially into the show.

It's State of the Human.

Today's show is called Listening.

It's full of people who open themselves up to new sounds, sounds they never expected to listen to.

We've got five stories today.

We're gonna listen to a baby crying and ask what that sound teaches us about why we like music.

We're gonna listen to the world through the ears of someone born deaf.

We'll listen to Quakers, to God.

And finally we'll ask, what is the power of being listened to?

That's all coming up.

Keep listening.

The issue of listening is much more complex than we generally talk about.

To start, we thought we should ask the question, what is listening?

Jonathan Berger is a composer and a professor of music here at Stanford.

There's this world of noise around us.

If you stop and think about just the amount of noise that you're trying not to record now, the cars outside and the grating of the window, and there's a bird landing there, and the sound of the fluorescent lights and all of this stuff.

A big part of listening is actually not listening.

Our awareness is kind of like an exclusive club, and listening is the bouncer in the Black Sabbath t-shirt, scowling.

It keeps background noises like fans and heaters and refrigerators out of our awareness.

But some sounds are VIPs.

They always get in.

Why?

And how?

I guess it's a sentence.

Okay, listen to one.

Should I say?

Tell this next story.

Sorry.

What is it about a baby's cry that makes it impossible not to attend to?

There's an obvious answer, and a not so obvious answer.

First, the obvious answer.

We hear a baby crying, and it triggers a desire to help.

But Jonathan Berger says there's something more, something in the cry itself that makes us listen.

We try to deal with sounds by finding coherent patterns in those sounds.

Sound is like a knot our brain wants to untie.

Traffic or the hum of your refrigerator, these sounds are predictable and easy to untangle.

After our brains have untangled them, we forget about them.

Take a moment to listen to the sounds around you.

Thank you.

Before you listen to them, did you even realize that they were there?

But not every sound is so straightforward.

A dripping faucet, for example.

So there are moments where a water faucet dripping is the greatest nuisance in the world.

It'll keep me up at night and it'll drive me crazy.

Unpredictability puts a knot in sound.

And a baby's cry is a knot of our nuts.

You know, they scream until they can't breathe, and then they take this breath, and they start the whole process again.

So, the generation of that scream has attributes of a periodicity.

In other words, there's constant fluctuation and change, so it's very difficult to string a pattern and say, oh, okay, I understand meaning from this.

Our brains don't like the chaos.

They can't find a pattern in the sound, and so they keep listening, trying to find one.

But there's something more than unpredictability at work.

The sound itself demands listening.

It too is a kind of not.

You're not shaping that noise with a resonator that's controlled, you're shaping the, you're just letting that scream out, going through this resonator of an open mouth, and it's just, you know, horrendous sound.

Instead of a pleasing combination of notes, let listen to some of the other notes.

A baby's cry contains random, charming frequencies.

And our brains don't like that.

If there's this blur of frequencies, as happens with the dissonant sound of a scream, it'll be very difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle it and say, here is the important frequency content of that signal.

It will end up with this sense of unhappy confusion.

But the result?

We pay attention.

The way human systems evolved has come to a point where creatures that are helpless and in need can produce this sound that demands attention.

A baby's cry?

It's an alarm system that exploits our brain's need to untangle knots.

And so, instead of ignoring it, we feed the baby, we change the diaper.

Or, if we're innocent bystanders, we stuff our fingers in our ears, leave the restaurant or glare, long and hard, at those awful, awful parents.

Because we don't like the sound.

The unpredictable patterns, the jarring frequencies.

If we had a choice, we'd never listen to this.

Or would we?

The piece of music is called Atmospheres by George Liggety.

No disrespect to that man, but this music, it's got some knots.

Jarring frequencies?

Check.

Unpredictability?

Yeah.

This music is kind of like a baby's cry.

But we like this.

Stanley Kubrick chose it for his classic film, 2001, A Space Odyssey.

And maybe you don't even find this music remotely uncomfortable.

Well, we could add some knots.

And we could keep going further, adding knots.

And some people would still find a way to like it.

This tells us something about listening.

What it tells us is that we can overcome what's automatic to us.

We're probably stuck being annoyed at crying babies.

You'd have to be inhuman not to feel something.

But with music, we take control over listening.

Instead of it telling us what to do, go help that crying baby.

We tell it what to do.

Every jarring chord, every unpredictable rhythm triggers something deep in us.

But we can learn to enjoy that.

It's a triumph over what's automatic in us.

So obviously, there are lots of differences between crying babies and noisy music.

One is a helpless being in trouble, the other an aesthetic luxury to savor.

But our brains experience them both as puzzles, as knots to untie and make sense of.

For most people who aren't new parents, puzzles like these are fortunately rare.

But what if you had to listen like this all the time?

What if everyday conversation was a puzzle?

Okay, so can you introduce yourself?

I'm Rachel Kolb.

I'm currently a co-term student at Stanford who just finished my bachelor's in English this afternoon.

Do you want me to say anything more?

Our managing editor, Rachel Hamburg, interviewed Rachel Kolb.

Rachel Kolb was born deaf, and she's chosen to live among hearing people.

She learned to speak growing up so she can make herself understood.

But understanding other people, that's been a huge challenge for her.

Eavesdropping and overhearing other people, what they say, has never been part of my vocabulary.

I have never found pretty, too incidental information in my life.

Rachel could never just overhear.

Listening for her has always meant intense focus.

Producer Victoria Hurst tells the story of what happened when Rachel listened to something she never expected to hear.

Rachel Kolb was born profoundly deaf.

Without hearing aids, what she heard was basically silence.

With them, she could hear a little, but the sounds were shapeless and distorted.

To communicate, she read lips.

This meant that listening was always a kind of puzzle.

I can't just listen with one part of my brain and look at something else or think of something else.

I have to fixate on what they say.

I'd be very pleasant in the moment if I want to really engage with them.

Kind of like you probably have to focus now.

You have to focus on her voice and pay attention to every word.

If you miss a word, you just have to flow with it.

Try to catch the next one.

This is the way Rachel has to listen all the time.

Sometimes it's sort of like a dance between getting information at the moment, realizing that I don't really understand nothing that can soon go.

Going back in my mind and realizing I don't know what that previous sentence was or what that previous word was.

And after 80 words, going to go.

With lip reading and her voice, Rachel could connect to another person through spoken language.

But it had to be just one other person, maybe two people.

More than that, and listening became impossible.

Words flew back and forth too fast and on too many lips for Rachel to get any sense of the conversation, let alone participate in it.

She knew people were talking, but she had no idea what they were talking about.

I tried to keep up and I tried to watch, but I'm essentially disconnected because the information is going back too fast for me to watch and too fast for me to pick up.

And I've been to so many situations where I know that people around me are talking, but I don't know what they're talking about.

It bothers me so much.

For example, if I'm driving in a car with someone the way back from a road trip and it's dark and I can't see what they're saying, or I'm sitting in the back seat and I can't see what everyone else is saying, I know that people are having conversation and I know they're talking about something.

There's actually so much to be interested in.

They're having some sort of exchange that I'm not aware of.

I've had friends tell me all the way about it.

They were just telling me some damn joke about social support friends, or they were talking about Justin Bieber.

You don't want to hear that, but in reality I do.

I want to know what people are saying.

Rachel was tired of feeling excluded from groups.

She was tired of not being able to listen and understand.

Her eyes were just tired.

Lip reading puts a huge strain on them.

So she started thinking of getting something called a cochlear implant.

It's a device implanted in the ear that would transmit electrical signals directly to Rachel's brain.

It would let her hear.

Cochlear implants are pretty controversial in the deaf community, where deafness isn't necessarily seen as a bad thing or something to change.

Rachel thought about all of this a lot.

But in the end, her desire to hear overcame all questions.

She wanted the implant.

In 2010, Rachel had surgery to get it installed.

She just got one cochlear implant in her left ear.

A doctor drilled into the back of her skull, inserted the device, and after a couple weeks of recovery, they turned it on.

And Rachel could hear.

But hearing to someone who's never heard before is nothing like how you or I hear.

So the first time they turned on my computer, I didn't see a lot of sound at all.

It felt like an electric shock.

And there was some info, but it was more like beep, but not beeps, but that's the closest that I can come to it.

It was like beep, beep, boom, boom, boom, boom.

I didn't know what that meant.

Rachel still needed to learn what sounds are.

All sounds.

At first, the only difference was sound or no sound.

And human speech was especially tricky.

It's like a piano keys be pushed one at a time or many at a time, depending on the composition of the sound waves coming in from the environment, and it may be crazy.

She basically had this new body part, her ear, that she had no idea how to use.

So she had to teach it.

She started going to a listening therapist, someone who would teach her how to understand those crazy sounds called human speech.

Every two weeks, in an office decorated with children's drawings, the speech therapist would stand behind Rachel and speak.

And Rachel tried to understand what she was saying.

My brain didn't know what hearing was before.

I didn't know what all of these high frequency noises were.

So when I'm listening, I'm going from the ground up.

That's why it takes so long.

After months of practice, Rachel could at last begin to tell sounds apart.

Eventually, the sounds started to sound different.

I can kind of distinguish human speech from a printer, from a vacuum cleaner.

This meant she was on the verge of something so tantalizing, listening, understanding, talking in a group.

But even after two years of practice, she wasn't there yet.

By 2012, two years after she'd gotten the implant, Rachel still relied a lot on lipreading.

Her ears gave her help here and there, but it wasn't much.

I was sitting here thinking about other things and overhearing other people say these very black-minded words, common phrases, you know, I think I like yesterday and was going to, and it's often annoying because I know the snippets of words are not the actual essence of language.

Rachel could pick out a pronoun like he, but she'd never find out what he did.

She'd hear the word yesterday, but she'd never find out what happened.

She was hearing words, which in a lot of ways was a huge step, but she was still far from understanding language.

And then, while she was straining to understand, something happened.

It happened Thanksgiving of 2012.

Rachel was in Albuquerque at the lab where she worked.

She was talking to a coworker about an award someone that they knew was about to receive.

The coworker turned her back to Rachel to make a phone call.

I knew what the subject would be, but I didn't know the specific words that she would use.

I didn't really expect that I would understand her conversation on the phone, so I should accept the receiving and look at the wall.

Rachel's coworker was standing with her back to Rachel, and Rachel expected to get, at best, snippets, a word here or there.

Remember, this woman had her back to Rachel.

Lip reading, Rachel's crutch, wasn't possible.

It was all in her ears, ears that so far hadn't been very helpful.

But then I realized that as she was talking, I was hearing her voice and understanding it.

It was a very, very sublime moment.

This had never happened before, in her whole life.

Before, Rachel could only talk to people she was looking directly at.

Now, her eyes were freed, and her ears were doing the work.

That moment of realizing that sound could give me that sort of situation of awareness was groundbreaking, even though the conversation that I overheard wasn't exciting or scandalous or even that interesting.

It gave me that sense of, oh, the world is so much more three-dimensional than we, and it's so much bigger than we, and we doesn't ever directly been able to experience.

Rachel added a new dimension to her world, literally.

She realized in an entirely new way that words, language, are out there, just waiting to be listened to.

In that moment of eavesdropping, she got a sense that the world was bigger than she'd ever experienced it to be, that there were more possibilities in it than she ever thought she could explore.

How often do we get that?

This experience of eavesdropping, it's still pretty rare.

Rachel knows she's a long way off, but she's getting closer every day, closer to the world of listening.

And now that she's been there, she's excited to go back.

Thanks to Rachel Kolb for sharing her story.

If you wanna know more about her decision to get the cochlear implant, there is a story all about that on our website.

It was produced by a student named Ariana Peck.

It's really good.

Thank you Welcome back to State of the Human.

Today's show is Listening.

We're asking, what happens when we listen to the unexpected?

In our last story, we heard from someone who broke into a new dimension by listening, and then she could begin to connect with people in an entirely new way.

Next, it's another story about listening to what people say, specifically how they work together to say it.

The first line of my dissertation is, this dissertation is a product of my fascination with how individual persons become a group of people.

Daniel Steinbock was a graduate student at Stanford.

You may have heard him on our show before.

Getting from I to we, that's actually an extraordinary achievement.

This story is also about Quakers.

Quakerism, sometimes called the Society of Friends, is a nearly 400 year old branch of Christianity.

Quakers are known for pacifism, simplicity of dress, using the as a pronoun.

You may have also seen one on your box of oatmeal.

You know, white hair, big hat, puffy red cheeks, Quaker Oats Man.

Needless to say, most of the 350,000 Quakers in the world don't look like that.

This story begins years ago, when Daniel's an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Zainab Taymouri takes the story from here.

It all started because Daniel wanted to know how Quakers work together.

So he drove off one rainy morning to meet some Quakers.

One rainy December Sunday.

He parked just before 10 a.m.

near the Santa Cruz Friends Quaker Meeting House.

It was between Christmas and New Year's in kind of that dark zone when people are absorbed in their family lives.

And there weren't actually that many people that day.

Outside the door, a Quaker woman greeted him hello.

She asked me if I'd ever been to a Quaker meeting before, and I told her I hadn't.

And then he made his way down a hallway to a room where a few people sat quietly.

At the appointed time, the woman who had greeted me at the door, she came in and closed the double doors.

And the room settled down into silence.

This is important because sitting is a big part of how Quakers worship.

They sit in silence for about an hour.

And when someone feels moved to speak by whatever inner urge comes to them in the silence, they stand and they speak.

And in that moment, they're the minister.

They're the spiritual leader temporarily.

We need to distinguish between two things that are pretty similar.

Okay, so Daniel was originally interested in a kind of Quaker meeting called Meeting for Business.

This is what got his computer science collaborative decision-making side all fired up.

Today, he's in a similar but different kind of meeting, Meeting for Worship.

There's nothing to talk about, and there's no decision to be made.

People can say whatever they want, or they can say nothing at all.

And over the course of an hour, maybe three people spoke.

One woman spoke about being on the path.

On one side of the path is the undisciplined, lazy, desire-driven life.

But on the other side of the path is really taking the path too seriously and growing rigid and over-moralistic.

And somewhere in the middle is where you find good footing.

And something about what she said in the context of my life at that time, coming to the end of college, my life opening up into the wide, picturesque world.

Before me, I was poised at the edge of a kind of an abyss.

And so when I listened to what she said, it sounded like she was speaking right to me.

Tears started coming down my face.

And I didn't wipe them away.

And when the Quaker meeting ended a few minutes later, the man and his daughters next to me, you know, turned and said good morning.

And I felt the dried tears on my face.

I felt like I'd found something.

So what next?

Daniel thought he was just doing some extra credit for school.

Instead, he found himself moved profoundly and kind of mysteriously.

It's not every day that a stranger's words make you weep.

So Daniel set out to understand what exactly had happened in that meeting.

How had the group worked together to achieve such a powerful moment?

The Quakers were new, but in a general sense, Daniel had been thinking about collaboration for a long time.

You know, when you get to this time of life when you don't know what you're gonna do with yourself for the next 60, 70 years, I know I want to help people, but how do I help people?

There are so many different places to do that.

And the insight that occurred to me that made sense to me was, well, in all these areas of life, the solutions basically come down to people in a room working together to figure something out.

It kind of hit me over the head.

If I could help groups of people collaborate better, then indirectly I could be helping to help people everywhere.

Okay, now fast forward a few years.

Daniel's out of the rain at sunny Stanford.

He applied for and was accepted to Stanford's Graduate School of Education.

He's trying to get a PhD, and collaboration is still very much on his mind.

So as he's thinking about what to spend the next few years researching and writing about, he thinks back to that experience in Santa Cruz.

These are the moments I had no way to understand that people could figure something out together without saying much at all.

Daniel would do his dissertation on Quakers.

He tried to decode their method of collaboration, figure out how they created moments of transcendent meaning.

And if things worked out, he might even be able to help people everywhere.

But first, he needed some Quakers.

I decided to practice some ethnographic field note making at the...

I can't say that.

Daniel can't say who he studied.

Neither can we.

You know, confidentiality protocols.

So a description will have to do.

The Quakers Daniel studied are mostly middle-aged or older, men and women, most Caucasian, atheists, deists, Buddhists, maybe a few dozen total.

And so I began attending this other Quaker meeting quite regularly, and I became a member of the community.

Daniel spent a lot of time reading about Quakers, but the main thing he did was hang out with them and go to their meetings, eat brunch with them after.

He even got on the IT committee and helped them make their website.

Sometimes I'd scribble a note here and there during a meeting for worship.

Most of the time I would wait until after the meeting and scribble furiously in my car after I'd left the meeting house.

Years passed, the world turned.

The global economy almost collapsed.

The Garfield movie came out.

And the mystery of what happened in the Quaker meetings stayed a mystery.

During the snack time afterwards, you know, over a glass of apple juice and some carrot sticks, I'd ask questions.

In their meetings for worship, Quakers talked about peace and justice and living a simpler, more authentic life.

But how did they know when to talk or what to say?

How come no one ever talked over anyone else?

These were the questions Daniel asked.

But no matter how much apple juice he drank, he never got any answers.

Not because the Quakers were evasive, but because he was asking the wrong question.

I was drawn to the most obvious aspects of what's happening in the Quaker meeting, specifically people speaking.

After four years, Daniel was nearing the end of his research.

He had notebooks crammed with observations, shelves sagging under tomes of Quaker history.

But his big finale was yet to come.

He was going to film the Quakers, and because Quakers sit in a circle, Daniel would film with a panoramic lens, 360 degrees.

He planned to analyze the video and study in minute detail the bodies of the Quakers as they sat in meeting.

But then as the big finale approached, something happened that changed everything.

There was a visitor to Quaker meeting one Sunday morning.

I announced my upcoming study and invited people to participate.

And after that, this visitor who was there from a far off Quaker meeting, he came up to me and asked me about the research and what the interest was, et cetera.

And I told him about my interest in what Quakers say in meeting and how they create together and build on each other's ideas, et cetera.

And he kind of looked at me funny and he said, well, what about the silence?

My response at the time to silence was to say, well, you know, my hypothesis is that silence creates a psychologically safe space for people to come up with their creative contribution.

And he said, okay, that's sort of interesting, but really you should look at the silence.

Silence is the most important thing happening in a Quaker meeting.

Daniel had been so close all along, but he'd missed it.

He thought he had to listen to speaking, ministering.

Now he realized he had to listen to silence.

And this was news to me, really.

As a social scientist, silence is nothing at all.

It's the space between words, which are the some things.

I didn't think of it as something in itself or as something that was being created, but that's what this friend was telling me.

That became my question.

What does silence consist of, really?

What's happening there?

What are people doing in and with silence?

Daniel still got to use his panoramic lens, but now he'd change his focus.

Instead of listening to what the Quakers said, he'd listen to their silence.

Daniel had had lots of informal chats with Quakers about silence over apple juice and carrot sticks, but now he decided to ask them directly what silence meant to them.

What were they thinking about?

How did they feel about it?

Was it as silent as it sounded?

Sometimes the silence is full and sometimes the silence is nearly empty.

You have to listen differently.

The Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh writes about how in his tradition, there are temple bells that chime, and hearing them, people are encouraged to pause and think to themselves, listen, listen, this wonderful sound calls me back to my true self.

In friends' meetings, we worship in silence and it's the silence that calls me back to my true self.

We think of silence as private, or sometimes as a weapon, angry silence.

But here the Quakers were practicing an open silence, a silence that invited participation.

Yes, sometimes people left that silence to speak, but when Quakers spoke, it was often to point others back to silence.

It sounds almost like a contradiction or a kind of perpetual loop, speaking that points to silence, which leads to more speaking.

Why not just stay silent?

One answer Daniel found was that in moments of transition, from silence to speech, from speech to silence, it was in these moments that the group truly became a group.

People rustle about together in these kind of synchronous waves.

You know, someone, the room will be perfectly quiet and then someone will cough.

And almost immediately, you know, five other people will scratch and sniffle, and three people will uncross their legs and recross their legs, and four people will open their eyes and tilt their head and close their eyes.

And then it settles back down to stillness.

When Daniel studied his panoramic video recordings, he could see frame by frame how Quakers work together.

There are all these complex detailed charts in his dissertation showing this.

What it shows is that the Quakers Daniel studied worked together in the silence to achieve the silence.

In the dissertation, there's a beautiful quote from one of the Quakers.

He talks about looking for his true self, but being in a hall of mirrors, and each mirror reflects back a different self, him as a child, a hero, a helper, a sage.

But he knows these reflections are false.

And so I close my eyes, he says, both to the mirrors outside and the ones inside, and I become aware of the sound of someone breathing, someone who is not myself.

It's you sitting next to me in meeting.

I apply all my senses but sight.

I hear you with more than my ears.

I can almost taste you, but I cannot see or touch you.

The rustles, breathing, coughs, remind me that I'm not alone, that you are here too, sitting in your circle of mirrors.

We all have halls of mirrors of one form or another, struggles with who we are or what we want to be.

But we're not alone in these struggles.

We don't have to be Quakers.

Anywhere, wherever we are, we can take the lesson to quiet ourselves, and in that quiet, to hear one another better.

Listen sometime for that rustling, that coughing, that scratching.

Know that those sounds are reminders from the people around you.

They're saying, I'm here.

I'm here.

Daniel Steinbock is a 2012 graduate of Stanford School of Education.

He is now teaching design at Tokyo University.

Welcome back to State of the Human.

Today's show is Listening, Stories of Listening to the Unexpected.

Our last story showed how much is in silence and how it can be a bridge to other people.

But there's something else that happens in silence in Quaker meetings.

We kind of passed over it and maybe you wondered about this.

So in Quaker meetings, there's something that tells people to speak in the silence.

Quakers call it intuition or divine inspiration.

But what is that like to hear something in silence that tells you to speak?

What if in that silence is a message?

Professor Tanya Luhrmann is an anthropologist at Stanford who investigated this question.

Sophomore Nina Fouchet brings us the story.

I was a blonde giggly woman who said that if I wanted to understand God and her church I should have a cup of coffee with him.

And I thought that was neat.

This is Tanya Luhrmann.

Before she studied evangelicals, she studied witches.

Many years ago, I wrote my dissertation on middle class people in England who described themselves as practicing magic and witchcraft.

And they talked about magical power and the way that it existed in the world, and how you could train your mind to manipulate it and direct it in particular ways.

When I started this project on evangelical Christianity, I saw something very similar.

People talked about learning to listen to God, and learn to hear God speak, and that intrigued me.

She wanted to study a church that made listening to God the center of religious experience.

She wanted to know what it felt like to listen to God.

One congregant told her, if you want to get to know God, go to coffee with him.

This was a particular kind of more charismatic, more experientially oriented evangelical church.

And people would come to the church and say that they, when they came, they didn't get this thing about hearing God.

And after they'd been in the church for six to 12 months, something like that, I'm sort of making that up.

They reported being able to have a sense that God was talking to them.

So the church would tell you that you are seeking to experience God the way they would experience a good friend.

So you talk to friends, they respond to you, they interact with you.

And the church teaches you that God will speak inside your mind, so that you should look for the ways in which God might be speaking, communicating in some way.

Professor Luhrmann's thesis was that over the course of these six to 12 months, people began to pay attention to their minds differently as they learned to listen for God.

So, I, as an observer, have a thesis.

My thesis is that the way you pay attention to your mind, the way you learn to pick out certain experiences in the mind, that changes something pretty basic about the mental experience.

Something surprising Luhrmann discovered was that listening to God's voice took practice, a specific and ancient kind of practice.

One of the best explanations comes from St.

Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order.

Ignatius taught people to access God through imaginative exercises.

They would visualize themselves in biblical scenes, like being a townsperson jostling to see Jesus give his sermon on the mount.

This kind of exercise is part of a larger discipline called cataphatic prayer, which uses imagery to invoke the divine.

Evangelicals use practices like these.

When people become good at this, they become comfortable with the idea that their mind is not walled off from the world.

It's not a private place, but it's a place where God can come.

And as they become more and more comfortable, they find that images and thoughts that feel striking to them, that stand out in some ways, they really come to them.

And they are, they're powerful.

According to Professor Luhrmann, hearing God begins as a structured conversation.

One, people consciously start through prayer, reading, or drinking coffee with God.

But over time, it stops being a conscious effort.

God just starts talking.

People are able to start experiencing their daily lives as a conversation.

But how do you know if it's God or just a thought?

In general, they would say that if a thought or a mental image stands out from different thoughts, if it's consonant with God's character, if it gives you a sense of peace when you experience it, then it's more likely to be God.

There's no final determinant.

You could be wrong.

Church could be wrong.

You might expect Professor Luhrmann, as an academic, to doubt that people are actually hearing God's voice.

But she's on the fence about what's possible.

She's had experiences that make her doubt just where the line is between possible and impossible.

And she doesn't think that anthropology can tell the difference.

I first became intrigued by unusual experiences when I was hanging out with people who call themselves magicians and witches in London.

And I was doing these practices that were pretty similar to the Ignatian spiritual practices.

And I woke up one morning and I saw six druids standing by the window.

And I'd just been reading this book on our three in Britain.

And it was, in effect, on my mind.

It was these images.

And I shot out of bed and they disappeared.

In effect, I was allowing myself, and I was in a world that took seriously experiences that were unusual.

I was in a world that encouraged you to look for those experiences.

And I was also changing my own gatekeeping about experiences.

We all learn to listen for what we consider to be possible.

When my mom plays the piano, she still listens for the sound of her mother's ghost coming into the room to listen.

Think about what gatekeeping practices you have.

What are you listening for, and what do you ignore?

I have an unsettled ontology.

I don't know quite where I land on these questions.

And I would say that you can understand these experiences from a secular or religious perspective.

I can see the human dimension of these changes.

Thank you to Professor Luhrmann.

Her book is called When God Talks Back.

You're listening to State of the Human.

The theme today is listening.

We're asking what happens when you take your listening where it's never been.

We've listened to silence, to God.

We've listened to human speech through the ears of someone born deaf.

Now a story about getting other people to listen to you.

This is the story of a Nigerian investigative journalist named Musikilu Mojeed.

He's a man willing to give his life to be listened to.

In some sense, he already has.

I am very careful about where I go.

I look over my shoulder all the time.

So you can't see me.

I hardly attend parties.

You can't see me in gardens or in parks or just anywhere.

I hardly have social life because, you know, I could be killed in Nigeria anytime.

This is Musikilu Mojeed.

I am a managing editor of the Nigerian newspaper, Premium Times, which is known for its investigative tradition.

Musikilu has been a reporter for most of the last 20 years.

He specializes in investigating corruption and has reported about corrupt presidents, corruption in the oil industry, corrupt academics and professors, just to name a few.

But of all the corrupt figures Musikilu has investigated, former Governor James Ibori stands out as one of the very worst.

The story of Ibori is actually a story for which I can sit down and do a book because I'm very, very familiar.

And it's a very nonsensical story.

How a serial thief, somebody who stole in the United Kingdom as a young man, who stole in Nigeria as a small contractor, lied his way to power and then continued to steal, stole more than half of the resources of his state.

In 1991, Ibori was a small-time criminal in the United Kingdom, convicted of stealing money from the till of his employer.

By 1999, Ibori was elected governor of the Delta State, an oil-rich region in Nigeria.

In eight years, he went from a small-time crook to one of the most powerful politicians in Nigeria.

For Musikilu, the story starts during Ibori's second term in office, in 2003.

Musikilu had recently moved to Nigeria's capital city, Abuja, and a source in Nigeria's anti-corruption agency gave Musikilu a tip that they were starting an investigation of Ibori.

You have some sense that he's corrupt at this point?

Of course, it's really clear.

Everybody knows, everybody does, is that this guy is corrupt.

Because he's living far beyond his known hanging.

The way his people around him, the kind of lifestyle they lived, the kind of automobiles he was acquiring, he even acquired a jet.

He was literally stealing his people blind.

Yboru and his friends flaunted their stolen wealth and meanwhile people in his state were dying for lack of basic medical care.

In Nigeria, corruption can be like background noise, so constant that you can't pay attention to it all the time.

Musikilu's job is often to turn the volume up on certain stories, to elevate some part of the drone of corruption so that everybody has to listen.

For me, when I talk about listening, it's about people taking action as a result of what they hear in the media.

People doing the right thing, adjusting things.

If you are told that there is a porthole along these roads, that a lot of people are dying as a result of the portholes, I expect government to halt and save more people from dying.

Thank you.

You said government has to listen.

Musikilu knows sometimes people listen, and sometimes they don't.

And it usually requires patience to know if anybody has truly listened.

In the case of Ibori, Musikilu knew he would have to be extremely patient.

In Nigeria, governors are immune from prosecution.

As long as Ibori was governor, he would not face trial.

But Musikilu was prepared to spend years reporting on Ibori, building public outrage for the day when Ibori left office.

Thank you watching Finally, in 2007, it happened.

Ibori's term expired and he lost his immunity.

It was the moment Musikilu and the Anti-Corruption Agency had prepared four years for.

In December of 2007, the Nigerian government arrested Ibori.

He was charged with theft of public funds, abuse of office, and money laundering.

But for Musikilu and his colleagues, this wasn't a victory yet.

Ibori still had to go to trial.

So for Musikilu, it was time to turn up the volume on the story.

So we kept the story on the front burner, and we reported aggressively about him.

We investigated the mistresses he had.

We investigated the assets he acquired.

We investigated, we wrote about everything he's doing to frustrate his trial.

The evidence against Ibori was strong, but Ibori's friends were stronger.

He had the president on his side, after all.

Ibori had donated a lot of money to Nigerian President Nyarotowa's campaign.

In 2008, a year after Ibori was first charged, Nyarotowa fired the head of the anti-corruption agency that had brought the case against Ibori.

He fired him for daring to investigate and prosecute his corrupt friends.

Well, the guy had to go on exile, because every now and then, the attempts were made on his life.

Ibori's trial continued, but it was a sham.

The first judge assigned to the case didn't seem appropriately sympathetic to Ibori, so the trial was moved to a specially created federal court.

This court was a lot more inclined to see things Ibori's way.

Two years after his arrest and six years after Musikilu began writing about him, Ibori was acquitted of all charges.

Musikilu and his fellow journalists had put everything into reporting on Ibori.

They'd kept the story going for six years and documented gross corruption.

But ultimately, nobody listened, not by Musikilu's standards.

What was that like?

When it got out of it, I was really, really devastated.

When they set up a court that never existed, just to help him to get out of it, I was thinking, is it really worth it to live in Nigeria?

When a guy could get out of what is clearly, this guy is corrupt, it's very clear, the evidences are there, everybody could see it.

Why do we write?

We write because we want to cause changes in our society.

It's like a soldier who goes to war and failed to defeat the enemy.

Those six years reporting on Ibori had been difficult in a lot of ways for Musikilu.

He'd been forced to leave one paper because of an accusation of unfair reporting from somebody he investigated.

He'd left another paper when one of his editors refused to run some of his best investigations.

His life had been threatened, and so were the lives of his family.

And for all his trouble, it's not like he was making a whole lot of money.

In fact, he'd watched many of his friends and colleagues get corrupted by the opportunity for money and power.

And then, not only did Abora get away with it, but the government actually got more corrupt.

One of the only tangible results of his work was that the head of the anti-corruption agency was forced to leave the country.

And you have to wonder why, in spite of all of this, Musikilu continued to believe that getting the government to listen was the best way to change his country.

And as it turns out, there's an answer.

And the answer lies in something that happened in high school that put Musikilu on this path, for good.

I had like two years to go from high school.

I was taking my sciences seriously.

I was a member of the Jets Club, which is, the Jets Club is Junior Engineer and Technician's Club, Press Club, because Nigeria has oil and most of the guys who were making money were engineers working in the oil industry.

But then, in high school, something happened.

Besides being a member of the Junior Engineers and Technicians Club, Musikilu was also a member of the High School Press Club.

They posted stories and cartoons on a board overlooking the schoolyard.

We've always written about stuff, light-hearted stuff.

But something worried me.

There was a shortcut in the schoolyard through a hole in the fence.

But the school administration had forbidden students from using it.

Anyone who got caught was whipped.

But the teachers doing the whipping?

They were taking the shortcut too.

Nobody gets to beat them.

Nobody whips them.

I thought that was injustice.

I thought that was injustice.

Thanks.

So I wrote an article.

I can still remember breaking the school fence, teachers in the game.

And we published it on our press board.

And the teachers were really angry because the press board at that time was very popular.

And they were really embarrassed.

And I remember some teachers, holding their whips and their canes, and they were looking for me all over the place.

And I had to run away for a while.

This was a reaction Musikilu expected from authority.

You have to remember, Musikilu mostly grew up under military dictatorships.

He was used to the idea that saying the wrong thing or challenging somebody could lead to beatings or worse.

He was familiar with being powerless in the face of injustice.

But this time, something different happened.

The principal is listening.

He told the teachers not to take the shortcut.

And even though it might seem like a little thing, it changed Musikilu's life.

At that point, even as a teenager, I realized it means if you write, it could affect some changes.

So I began to take my writing seriously.

That first experience of being listened to, it flipped a switch in Musikilu, transformed him from an oil engineer in training to someone who'd devote the rest of his life to challenging power.

Over the course of his career, he's been disappointed over and over again by lack of listening.

The Ibori case, for example, disappointed him repeatedly.

Here was someone clearly guilty who kept beating the system.

But the Ibori case also, in the end, was a kind of vindication for Musikilu, proof of his faith in journalism's power to make people listen.

When Ibori was acquitted, Musikilu struggled to keep the story going.

It wasn't looking good for his investigation.

But then, new hope came in 2010, with the release of hundreds of thousands of secret United States diplomatic cables by the organization Wikileaks.

Buried in these cables were hints of Ibori's coming downfall.

When Wikileaks released a catch-up document of US., we were looking for anything that has to do with Ibori.

We dug deep and we got a lot of stuff about how he tried to do a deal with the Americans, how he thought by giving away part of his stolen money could help him.

So we kept doing this story and we realized that the United Kingdom and the United States were listening.

In the leaked documents from the United States government, Musikilu and his colleagues learned that behind the scenes, the whole international community was paying attention to the corrupt Obori.

They even found documents warning US diplomats not to be in the same room as him.

Because we kept writing, the world was listening, even though our country wasn't listening.

And what happened?

What happened was, Obori's protector, President Yorotowa, he died.

A combination of national and international pressure prompted the new president to again bring charges against Obori.

Obori fled to the United Arab Emirates, but by this time, Obori was wanted in both Nigeria and the United Kingdom, and the two countries worked together to get him extradited to the UK.

In 2012, Obori was sentenced to 13 years in UK prison.

By this time, Musikilu was the managing editor of the online newspaper, the Premium Times.

Him and his staff were elated.

He is not just in jail, his wife is in jail, his lawyer is in jail, his mistress is in jail, his sister is in jail, the Bory clan, they are all in jail.

There's the saying that you can't unring a bell.

Often people say it about things they wish they could take back.

But it actually summarizes Musikilu's power.

Musikilu rings the bell over and over.

And when people listen, it starts an irreversible process of change.

We are naive when we think that what we write about should cause immediate changes.

At times, changes don't happen immediately, they happen gradually.

So for me, I think that for as long as something goes out and people listen to it and they get to know about it, you may cause changes that you may not even know about.

Thank you to Musikilu Mojeed for sharing his story.

Thank you for.

Today's program was produced by me, Charlie Mintz, with help from Jonah Willinghans, Natasha Ruck, Rachel Hamburg, Sandra Clark, Sophia Paliza, Victoria Hearst, Josh Hoyt and Will Rogers.

Thanks to everyone who shared their stories, Rachel Kolb, Eoin Callery and D'or Seifer, Jonathan Berger, Musikilu Mojeed, Tanya Luhrmann and Daniel Steinbock.

Wanna welcome our newest contributors, Crystal Lee and Zainab Taymouri.

Thanks to all the amazing musicians who made their songs available through Creative Commons licenses.

We appreciate being able to use that music in our stories.

You can find a complete list of the music we used on our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.

For the generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Stanford Institute for Creativity in the Arts, Stanford's Oral Communication Program, Stanford Continuing Studies, the Hume Writing Center and Bruce Braden.

KZSU would like to thank the law offices of Fenwick and West for their continued underwriting support.

You can find a podcast of this and every episode of State of the Human on Stanford iTunes and on our website.

For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Charlie Mintz.

Thanks for listening.