Listening

Listening

Transcript for Listening (Full Episode)

Eoin Callery: [00:00:00] It's the same thing if you listen to one note and then if we put on the sustained pedal. 

Charlie Mintz: Welcome to State of the Human. It's the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project. I'm Charlie Mintz, 

Eoin Callery: and you'll hear all of these notes. 

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

Eoin Callery: one pitch, and then you'll hear all of these other things.

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

Eoin Callery: 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. I was like, okay. It's like, oh my God. She's got perfect pitch.

She's wonderful. Yeah. I think my mind was elsewhere at that stage.

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

Eoin Callery: Once was a woman who lived in the woods

once, was a woman who lived in the woods now by the riverside. 

Charlie Mintz: My name is a Calory. 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. 

D'or Seifer: My name is D'or Seifer. Having perfect pitch. Um, 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 whatever it is. Um, 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.[00:02:00] 

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

Eoin Callery: I would say that a pitch for me is the tent possible tone. It is like trying to describe, like I have a friend who's a, 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. 

D'or Seifer: Learning that I have perfect pitch, you know, I must have had it before because people say that it's innate that, that you, you know, 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 'cause at that point I also stopped being a musician.

Eoin Callery: 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. Uh, 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 [00:04:00] 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 Chrisy Hartman put that story together.

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

Charlie Mintz: 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. 

Jonathan Berger: You know, 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, the grating of the window and there's a bird landing there, and you know the sound of the fluorescent lights and all of this stuff.

Charlie Mintz: 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 that's a sentence. Okay. Listen to one platform. Should I start? Mm-hmm. Sophomore Krystal Le and Professor Jonathan Berger tell this next story.

Jonathan Berger: What is it about a baby's cry? That makes it impossible not to attend to.

Krystal Le: There's an obvious answer and a not so obvious answer. First, the obvious answer. [00:06:00] 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. 

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

Krystal Le: 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.

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

But not every sound is so straightforward. A dripping faucet, for example.

Jonathan Berger: So there are, there are moments where a water faucet dripping is the greatest nuisance in the world. It'll keep you, keep me up at night and night. It'll drive me crazy. 

Krystal Le: Unpredictability puts a knot in sound and a babies cry, it's a knot of all knot. 

Jonathan Berger: You know, they, 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, there's constant fluctuation and change. So it's very difficult to, to string a pattern and say, oh, okay, I understand meaning from this. 

Krystal Le: Our brains don't like the chaos. They can't find a pattern in the sound, and so they keep listening.

I trying to find one, but there's something more than unpredictability at work. The [00:08:00] sound itself demands listening. It too is a kind of knot. 

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

Krystal Le: Instead of a pleasing combination of notes, a baby's cry contains random jarring frequencies, and our brains don't like that. 

Jonathan Berger: If there's this blur of frequencies as happens with the dissonance sound of a scream, it it'll be very difficult, if not impossible to disentangle it and say, here, here is the important frequency content of that signal. It will end up with this sense of unhappy confusion. 

Krystal Le: But the result, we pay attention.

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

Krystal Le: 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?[00:10:00] 

The piece of music is called Atmospheres by George Ligety. 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 unhuman 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 cord, 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. It's a kind of freedom.

Charlie Mintz: 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, [00:12:00] 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?

Rachel Hamburg: Um, okay, so can you introduce yourself?

Rachel Kolb: I'm Rachel, I'm currently a coterm term student at Stanford who just finished my, my passions in English back too. 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.

Evesdropping and overhearing other people, what they say has never been part of my vocabulary. I have never been privvy too information in my life. 

Charlie Mintz: 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. 

Victoria Hurst: Rachel Kob 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. 

Rachel Kolb: I can't just, listen with one part of my brain and not have something else, or think of something else. I have to fixate on what they say and be very present in the moment if I want to really engage with them. 

Victoria Hurst: 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 [00:14:00] is the way Rachel has to listen all the time.

Rachel Kolb: Sometimes it sort of like a dance between got the information in the moment, realizing that I don't really understand nothing, that concern go, going back in my mind and realizing, oh, I know what that previous sentence was, what that previous word was, and active 80 words going to go.

Victoria Hurst: 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. 

Rachel Kolb: I tried to keep up and I tried to watch, but I'm essentially disconnected because the information is going very too fast for me to watch and too fast for me to pick up. And I've been so many situations where I know about people around me are talking, but I don't know what they're talking about.

And it bothers me so much. For example, if I'm driving in a car with someone on the way back from a road trip and it's dark and I can't see what they're saying, um, oh, I'm sitting in the backseat and I can't think what everyone else is saying. I know that people are having conversation and I know they're talking about something. They are laughing so it must be funny. They're, um having some sort of exchange that I'm not gonna, I've had friends tell me or don't worry about it. They were just telling some dumb joke about so and so's boyfriend, or they were talking about trusting people, but you don't want to hear that, but in reality, I do. I want to know what people say.

Victoria Hurst: Rachel was tired of feeling excluded from groups. [00:16:00] 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, it's nothing like how you or I hear. 

Rachel Kolb: So the first time been turned on my Cochlear Impant uh, it didn't feel like sound at all. It felt like electric shock and it wasn't painful, but it was more like beep, not beeps, but that the closest that I can compare to it was like, beep beep.

I didn't know what that meant. 

Victoria Hurst: 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.

Rachel Kolb: It's like piano keys one at a time or many at a time depend on the composition of the sound, waves come on from the environment and it may be crazy.[00:18:00] 

Victoria Hurst: 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.

Rachel Kolb: 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.

Victoria Hurst: After months of practice, Rachel could at lasts, begin to tell sounds apart. 

Rachel Kolb: Eventually the sound started to sound fun and I can kind of distinguish human speech from a printer.

Victoria Hurst: 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 lip reading. Her ears, gave her help here and there, but it wasn't much.

Rachel Kolb: I was sitting here thinking about other things and overhearing other people say these very fragmented words, common phrases, you know. I think, I like, yesterday I was going to, and it's often annoying because I know the significance of words are not the actual [00:20:00] essence of language. 

Victoria Hurst: 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. 

Rachel Kolb: I knew what the subject would be, but I didn't know the specific words.

I didn't really expect that I wouldn't understand her conversation on the phone. So as she picked up the receiving, I looked on the wall. 

Victoria Hurst: Rachel's coworker was standing with her back to Rachel. And Rachel expected to get at best snippets a word here 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. 

Rachel Kolb: That as she was talking. I was hearing her voice and understanding it.

It was a very, very severe moment.

Victoria Hurst: 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. 

Rachel Kolb: That moment of realizing that [00:22:00] sound could give me that skill in a situation of awareness was groundbreaking, even though the conversation that I was over hearing wasn't exciting or scandalous, even that interesting. It gave me that sense of, of the world, so much more 3-dimensional than we, and so much bigger than me. In a way that I've never directly been able to experience. 

Victoria Hurst: 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.

Charlie Mintz: Thanks to Rachel Kolb for sharing her story. If you wanna know more about her decision to get the cochlear implant, there's a story all about that on our website. It was produced by a student named Ariana Peck. It's really good.

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.

Daniel Steinbock: The first line of my [00:24:00] dissertation is, this dissertation is a product of my fascination with how individual persons become a group of people.

Charlie Mintz: Daniel Steinbock was a graduate student at Stanford. You may have heard him on our show before.

Daniel Steinbock: Getting From I to we, that's actually a, an extraordinary achievement.

Charlie Mintz: 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 Taymuree takes the story from here.

Zainab Taymuree: It all started because Daniel wanted to know how Quakers work together, so he drove off one rainy morning to meet some Quakers.

Daniel Steinbock: One rainy December Sunday, 

Zainab Taymuree: he parked just before 10:00 AM near the Santa Cruz friends Quaker meeting house. 

Daniel Steinbock: 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. 

Zainab Taymuree: Outside the door, a Quaker woman greeted him, hello. 

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

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

Daniel Steinbock: 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. 

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

Daniel Steinbock: They sit in silence for about an hour, [00:26:00] 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.

Zainab Taymuree: 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. 

Daniel Steinbock: 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, you know, 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 [00:28:00] 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, and I, I felt the dried tears on my face and I felt like I'd found something.

Zainab Taymuree: 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. 

Daniel Steinbock: 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 kinda hit me over the head. If I could help groups of people collaborate better, then indirectly I could be helping to help people everywhere.[00:30:00] 

Zainab Taymuree: 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.

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

Zainab Taymuree: 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. 

Daniel Steinbock: I decided to, um, practice some ethnographic field note making, uh, at the. Uh, I can't say that 

Zainab Taymuree: Daniel can't say who he studied. Neither can we, you know, confidentiality protocols. So a description we'll 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. 

Daniel Steinbock: And so I began attending this other Quaker meeting. Quite regularly and I became a member of the community. 

Zainab Taymuree: 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 help them make their website.[00:32:00] 

Daniel Steinbock: 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, scribble furiously. Um. In my car after I'd left the meeting house. 

Zainab Taymuree: 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 

Daniel Steinbock: the, the snack time afterwards, you know, over a glass of apple juice and some carrot sticks, i'd ask questions.

Zainab Taymuree: 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. 

Daniel Steinbock: I was drawn to the most obvious aspects of what's happening in the Quaker meeting. Specifically people speaking.

Zainab Taymuree: 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. [00:34:00] 

Daniel Steinbock: There was a, 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, from a, a far off Quaker meeting, he came up to me and asked me about the research and what the, what the interest was and 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 kinda looked at me funny and he said, well, what about the silence? My, 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, um, 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.

Zainab Taymuree: 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, 

Daniel Steinbock: 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 somethings. 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, well, [00:36:00] what does silence consist of? Really? What's happening there? Um. What are people doing in and with silence?

Zainab Taymuree: Daniel still got to use his panoramic lens, but now he changed his focus. Instead of listening to what the Quaker 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? 

Quaker 1: Sometimes the silence is full and sometimes the silence is nearly empty.

You have to listen differently.

Quaker 2: The Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, Tik Han, 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.

Zainab Taymuree: When we think of silence as private or sometimes as a weapon, angry silence. But here the Quakers were practicing an open silence. [00:38:00] 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. 

Daniel Steinbock: People wrestle 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.

Zainab Taymuree: When Daniel studied his panoramic video recordings, he could see frame by frame how Quakers worked together. There are all these complex, detailed charts and his dissertation showing this. What it shows is that the Quakers Daniel studied work together in the silence, to achieve the silence.

In the dissertation, there is 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 [00:40:00] 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 russle, 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.

Charlie Mintz: Daniel Steinbach is a 2012 graduate of Stanford's School of Education. He's now teaching design at Tokyo University.

Our last story showed how much is in silence and how it can be a bridge to other people. [00:42:00] 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 Luhrman is an anthropologist at Stanford who investigated this question. Sophomore, Nina Foushee brings us the story. 

Tanya Luhrmann: There was a blonde, giggly woman who said that if I wanted to understand God in her church, I should have a cup of coffee with him.

I thought that was neat. 

Nina Foushee: This is Tanya Luhrmann, before she studied evangelicals, she studied witches. 

Tanya Luhrmann: Many years ago, I, I wrote my dissertation on middle class people in England, uh, who describe 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 um, saw something very similar. People talked about learning to listen to God. They learned to hear God speak, and that intrigued me. 

Nina Foushee: 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. 

Tanya Luhrmann: 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 [00:44:00] for six to 12 months, something like that, I'm sort of making that up.

They reported being able to have a, a sense that God was talking to them. So the church would tell you, um, that you are seeking to experience God the way they 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, um, you should look for the ways in which God might be speaking, communicating in some way.

Nina Foushee: 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 learn to listen for God. 

Tanya Luhrmann: So I, I, as an observer, have a thesis. I, my thesis is that the way you pay attention to your mind, the way you learn to, um, pick out certain experiences in the mind that changes something pretty basic about the mental experience.

Nina Foushee: Something surprising Luhrman discovered was that listening to God's voice took practice. A specific and ancient kind of practice. One of the best explanations comes from Saint 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 town's person, jostling to see Jesus give his sermon on the mount.

This kind of exercise is part of a larger discipline called kataphatic Prayer, which uses imagery to invoke the divine. Evangelicals use practices like these.

Tanya Luhrmann: When people become good at [00:46:00] this, they, 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. And they find that, uh, images and thoughts that it feels striking to them that stand out in some ways.

They, they, they really come to them and they are, um, they're powerful.

Nina Foushee: According to Professor Luhrman 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?

Tanya Luhrmann: In general? They would say that if a thought or a mental image stands out from different thoughts, um, if it's constant with God's character, if, um, 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.

Nina Foushee: You might expect Professor Luhrman 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.

Tanya Luhrmann: Um, 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. Um, [00:48:00] I woke up one morning and I saw six Druids standing by the window, and I'd just been reading this book on, you know, Arthurian in Britain.

And, uh it, it was as in effect on my mind. It was the, these images and, you know, 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. Um, I was in a world that encouraged you to look for those experiences. And I was also changing my own, uh, gatekeeping about experiences. 

Nina Foushee: 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? 

Tanya Luhrmann: I have an unsettled ontology. I don't know quite where I land on on these questions, and I would say that I can. You can understand these experiences from a secular or religious perspective. You know, I can see the human dimension of these changes.

Speaker 11: Thank you to Professor Luhrman. Her book is called, when God Talks Back.​

Ariana Peck: What would it mean if [00:50:00] suddenly at age 20, you heard your own breath for the very first time. It might sound mechanical, harsh, and grading, but it was there constantly with you for the first time in your life. I had never thought about that question before. March 14th, two years ago when my friend Rachel decided to get a surgery that promised to change her life.

It was our sophomore year at Stanford and we were roommates. Like any other roommate, para, we griped about classes and teased the others quirky habits. But unlike most roommates, we didn't rock out to music together or hit s news on the other's alarm clock. Rachel was deaf, so we communicated with a mixture of speech and sign language.

She ad hearing aids to amplify her residual hearing, but mainly she lipread and pieced my sentences together based on context. I wasn't familiar with deaf accents, so there were times when I struggled to understand her. And when I didn't enunciate clearly enough, she struggled to understand me. So it wasn't perfect, but we made it work.

It was a sunny afternoon in June, a week before Rachel was scheduled to get surgery to replace one of her hearing aids with a cochlear implant. If it worked, the implant would electrically stimulate her auditory nerve to enable her to hear so much more. But that afternoon when I came back to our room. I found her crying from frustration.

It shocked me, Rachel, who was always calm and collected crying from frustration? What was wrong? I asked. They canceled the surgery because I didn't respond to a voicemail about the logistics. She told me, but why would you leave a voicemail for a person who's going to get a cochlear implant? That's the whole point of this, that I'm deaf.

That moment in a room crystallized how hard, how nearly impossible it must be for Rachel to navigate this hearing world. How could this life-changing decision hang in the balance because of our stupid oversight? And by us, I mean everyone who takes hearing for granted. It was stupid, but to be honest, I was complicit too, because there were times during that year when I had almost called Rachel carelessly forgetting that she could only use her phone to text.[00:52:00] 

But Rachel was a veteran in dealing with that sort of thoughtlessness, especially since leaving her supportive family and moving to Stanford, it was what led her to want a cochlear implant in the first place. 

Rachel Kolb: Well I think what prompted me to even think about the cochlear implant was college. I don't mean to say college in itself as in college is the culprit or college, the college experience really good. We did this, but it was more of the experience of leaving home with the face support family that always signed to me. That always allowed me to have the access to the world around me and coming into this world where no one really knew about how to cope with my hearing loss and honestly, there not that many people seem to care of that much.

And because of that, I really brought myself to base that reality that the world functions very much as a hearing world, and I need to somehow enable myself to cope with this healing world and this healing reality in a way that I never had to when I was living at home. 

Ariana Peck: In college, Rachel found herself living in a world insensitive to her constant struggle with communication, but there were so many factors complicating her decision to get a cochlear implant.

Rachel had learned to lip read and speak thanks to her residual hearing, but the surgery would destroy that and replace it with something she could only speculate about. So there was no trial period, no return policy. If she didn't like it, there was no going back. How many factors go into a decision? I asked Rachel to show me the sign for cochlear implant.

She curled the index and middle fingers of her right hand and separated them just a bit to form a sort of crooked v. It reminded me of Viper Teeth. 

Rachel Kolb: Like a set up teeth about two dig [00:54:00] something. So we take these two fingers up and then you basically peel thumb into your skull. It's, it started as kind, derogatorysign but the deaf community to implant that we really like set of viper teeth externally imposed by hearing people or doctors. By this sinking into that persons skull to put something there that didn't belong there.

Before college, before the whole time of self actually happened. To be honest, plenty of urge to cook implant for myself just because, um, I thought that I was gonna, you know, fine And to be honest, I thought that getting a cochlear implant was kind of judgment that I would be casting on myself where I would be basically the fact or accepting the fact somehow that I was made somehow infurior or broken or less than perfect, and that I would be, um, trying to fix myself, when there was really nothing wrong with me.

And that was the mindset I had, and it took me a while to get over that and get over that impression that deep down it would be Taking away some my integrity.

So anyway, I decided to go ahead with it because I realized that that world's perception, also the healing world's perception of me, we would necessarily, but deep down its what mattered

Ariana Peck: Rachel's college experience cast cochlear implants in a different light. She once told me that many deaf people could not imagine, did not even want to imagine what the world would be like with sound, but she did not live in a supportive, deaf community, and she was not isolated from the hearing world.

How many times would she have to tune out during dinner conversations? [00:56:00] Decline an invitation to the movies, sit in silence during road trips with friends. How many nights would she lie awake in the darkness wishing she could take control of her situation? Living at Stanford changed her mind about cochlear implants.

She no longer saw it as a viper, sinking its teeth into her skull, or an attempt to heal herself. Instead, she saw it as a chance to enable herself in a world of sound. It would not transform her into a hearing person overnight, and she knew that she would never achieve as much understanding of sound as a hearing person, and she knew that too, but still she wanted to give it a chance.

And in a stroke of luck, she managed to reschedule her surgery at Stanford Hospital before she went home for the summer. The school year had ended, so I didn't see Rachel until months after her surgery, but later she told me about the two weeks she spent at home before the doctors turned her cochlear implant on.

One of her hearing aids still worked, but the sound was diminished and inferior without its pair. So those were two weeks of nervous, anxious waiting. 

Rachel Kolb: There was this hole in my head. A hole of sound, but also of anticipation because I knew that there was something, within that that eventually would be turned on.

It would give me something I had never imagined before. 

Ariana Peck: Two silent weeks of anticipation and then she was back at Stanford Hospital. She sat in the doctor's office waiting as the audiologist ran tests on her computer to find out whether the surgery had been successful. It was. The audiologist turned the device on and suddenly Rachel jumped two inches out of her seat, landing with her hands flat on the table in front of her breathing very hard. Sound was there abruptly in an entirely new way. She said it felt like an electric shock. Not in a painful way, but not pleasurable and not intelligible either. It was like binary code at the beginning. Silence was no sound. Beep was sound. So when the audiologist ran through the days of the week, Monday became beep, beep, Tuesday, beep beep, and so [00:58:00] on, that was expected at first.

She would have to learn how to interpret those beep beeps. How to distinguish between the beep that meant you and the beep them at me. But how far would she get and how long would it take her to get there? 

Rachel Kolb: I took a little while I remember be this crazy mess for the first month. It was really this chaos.

I remember going to work pretty soon after it got turned on and hearing myself type. I had never heard myself type before. I had never heard the keyboard clicking before and that noise it, it sounded like, dang slowly, and my hair sounded like this constant crashy. I never really sit back, take a deep breath and hearing my breath. My own breath would make me crazy listening to it. 

Ariana Peck: I tried to imagine it going the first 20 years of my life without hearing my own breath. I couldn't. But it wasn't just a maelstrom of environmental sounds that Rachel had to decipher. And to a certain extent, that wasn't even the point. The real purpose of getting the cochlear implant was to enable her to understand words without lip reading, so that her deafness would not be a daily encumbrance in this hearing world.

But how much could she understand when people spoke? 

Rachel Kolb: At the beginning it was think like people's phones to sound and kind of like the adults voices from Charlie Brown, you know, with the parents or the grownup people coming to the comic Charlie Brown, kind of w it's sounded like this big empty noises, that's something that I always have to explain to other people that, deaf and hearing, uh, kind of relative terms and be ableto hear isn't necessarily analogous to being able to understand. 

Ariana Peck: But understanding did come in the months of intensive auditory therapy that followed, she was back at home. So she and her family started with simple things just by counting syllables. Slowly, they began filling in those empty [01:00:00] speech bubbles with words.

Enough so that a month and a half later she was itching to try out a phone conversation with her mom. 

Rachel Kolb: We didn't start out by picking up the phone by any means, just talking into like a hearing person. But we would write out a couple of questions that she would ask, I would answer. So we tried to do that I talked on the phone and suddenly phoned off on my mom. Sounded like a duck, like donald duck that like this very high, very squeaking noise, and I just sat there and laughing to myself. 

Ariana Peck: So there were glitches, of course, but it's amazing to think that two months after her surgery was nearly canceled because of a missed voicemail.

Rachel was already picking up the phone to speak with her mom. Moments of frustration, moments of exhilaration. But what about moments of discovery? Because we don't just use sound to map out our environment or to communicate with other people. It's more than just a tool. It's an art as well. Did Rachel perceive its beauty?

Rachel Kolb: I went through an opera after my cochlear impant and it really was just something I'd done out of wanting to know what that sound like. when do you talk about music. Right now with the company of that, I find that I enjoy music or style, those songs that have less complexity than others, that I don't like music that have a strong beat plus piano that I can tell, plus all of these different layers.

I can't and overwhelms my brain. I don't know what's going on. I cannot really follow anyone aspect of it. Someone had heard that opera, but I kind of music that did away with a lot of those aspects of, it was like, it was something that burned my whole mind and um, gave me trust at times, but also was something that I didn't quite know what to do with.

I remember sitting there think he, what exactly is going or what exactly does [01:02:00] this sound mean? I enjoy the opportunity, the experience um, hearing that sound rushed past me at these huge waves that would go up and down and all over the place, but at the same time, it bothered me because I couldn't describe why it made me feel other way that I thought

Ariana Peck: I held my breath when she described it like that. Like huge waves rushing past her and crashing in her mind. But she laughed when I asked her whether she now preferred music to silence. No, she said she still loved the feeling of floating in silence without the disruptions of sharp, unexpected noises, because that's what she said the cochlear implant sounded like harsh, mechanical, robotic. So for now, she does not want to replace her other hearing aid with a second cochlear implant. The cochlear implant expands her dynamic range, but the hearing aids smooth out its harshness. And when I wondered how much Rachel's perception of sound had changed, that's what struck me most, that she would forsake the possibility of more sensitivity for better acoustic quality.

A second implant would give her more hearing, but it would come at the cost of sensory appeal. For now, she's decided that's not a price worth paying, so her journey continues. She knows that there's a limit that she'll never achieve the same understanding of sound as a hearing person or even a deaf individual implanted as an infant.

But even if music will never be an essential part of her life, she's still able to access so much more sound with each passing month. 

Rachel Kolb: It's been definitely a time of frustration in terms but also just amazing discovery and um, a lot of people ask me how do I look back on this and think of it after my decision?

And that's something that I, um, wasn't sure about when I first decided to do it, but my answers definitely, absolutely and then[01:04:00] 

Ariana Peck: she knew it was the right decision when she considered how much more access she had to the hearing world. But what about her deaf identity? She straddled two worlds. One foot was gaining purchase in the world of sound. But the other had always been planted in the world of silence. Would she withdraw that foot now? I got my answer. A year and a half later when we went to Matria, this restaurant launched by a deaf couple in San Francisco. To be honest, it was an incredible experience because for Rachel, it was her first time. 

Rachel Kolb: I am usually going to restaurant to have hearing people around me. I have to sit there trying to punch the knee of where I, what they say, where they are can I see their faces? Can I not be them? If they're asking me the order, if they asking me if I want water, I'm sitting at the table head, cannot see the other people at the table can, I could tell back, kind understand. But they say you keep up with the conversation. 

Ariana Peck: But she said Matza was different. For the first time in 22 years, Rachel stepped into a restaurant where she could release that tension because when we walked through the doors, we greeted, not by sound, but by sign. 

Rachel Kolb: I saw there was something was sitting the next to us and one older lady waved the hand and she started end up a conversation with sign.

I never, I mean, I gone to a restaurant before and had a spontaneous conversation with another person. So having her just strike up a conversation say hello, but virtue of the fact that we both sign made me feel that I could release some of that tension that I always carry about with me and just communicate and understand.

Ariana Peck: Rachel is a quiet person when she's not around her family. But as we started to eat, I could tell that she was excited about the conversation she had had with the table next to us. Maybe excitement isn't even the right word. There was something about it that touched her deeply, that made her seem more vibrant and alive, and she wasn't the [01:06:00] only one affected.

That moment was powerful for me too, because I think I finally caught a glimpse of what Rachel confronted on a daily basis. It seems silly, you know, we were roommates for an entire year, and back then I thought that I had understood what she faced. But it wasn't until that moment as I watched her converse with a stranger and realized, wow, I don't even understand one word out of 10.

She had told me that once, that before the cochlear implant, that's how much she understood. I wanted Rachel and that other woman to slow down to be more precise so that I could understand. But in the end, all I knew for sure was that she had signed fish. Why fish? I asked Rachel when she turned back to our table.

She laughed. She was glowing. Oh, she said she really liked the fish entree. She scanned the menu briefly. I think I'll go with the pizza though. It was like being in a foreign country like the time my family traveled to Mexico when I was eight and I could only understand simple things. Carbonated water, agua con gas, bathroom, el baño Beach, la Playa.

But we weren't in a foreign country and I wasn't a tourist. I knew if I stepped outside, I would be in the heart of San Francisco just 30 minutes away from where I grew up. I was home, but at the same time I was out of place. It was very disquieting. It was beautiful to watch their conversation in sign Their hands were so fluid and graceful, not at all like my fumbling motions.

Before she was implanted, Rachel told me that she was grateful that I signed because it helped her understand me. But now that she had the cochlear implant, my fumbling sign language was a drop in a bucket compared to my voice. Did she still want me to sign to her? I wondered, did she still want to sign to me?

I finally asked her, and I realized that the cochlear implant had transformed sign language for her, but not in the way I expected. I thought that she might withdraw from it in circumstances like ours because she no longer needed it as a crutch in our friendship, but it went deeper, far deeper than that.

Rachel Kolb: No, I definitely do appreciate keeping sign language language [01:08:00] in our relationship. I think sign language will always be close to my heart. I value using it because it's a tool, and it's something that defines me in a way. I sometimes will shy away from sign language if that person doesn't know sign, simply because I don't want to just talk about sign.

I don't want to show thousand sense of people have to sign the alphabet and never have a conversation about anything else. So my ability to speak allows me to have really fair discussions with people that go beyond sign language, but sign language in itself it's something that I really love sharing with other people who know it.

I remember after the company of that, my sign language interpreter from high school. Sat down and had lunch with me and she said, well, we always sign together before, but now that you have your implant do you not want me to sign, do you want me to, instead just talk you to talk him about that. Yeah. Said, no, I need you to sign, I want you to sign because that's who we are.

That's how we are, together. We can't stop doing that. 

Ariana Peck: Rachel thought that recording her experience in an audio format was an ironically wonderful way of telling her story. And it was so wonderful to hear her retell these memories, but at times it felt strange, disorienting, even because with my right hand on the mic, I couldn't sign to her.

When I asked her each question and because we were capturing her voice on tape, she didn't sign back to me either. But as soon as I clicked off the device, as soon as I put down the mic, my fingers brushed against my chin before my right hand swept out an arc in front of my chest. Thank you. I signed to Rachel saying it aloud too.

I told her with my hands and my voice that I thought we had captured some really great moments, and I found myself smiling as she began to speak and automatically raised her hands in response as they traced out a flurry of graceful gestures illuminated by the morning [01:10:00] sun.