Steve_Bamlett_blog

What do you listen to while you work?

Listening has always been a theme of my aspirations in work and life. When I worked as a social worker and as a social work teacher, the answer would have been obvious – if you do work, social work, you listen to the person with whom you are conversing. And in that context listening means a lot: hearing sub-textual pain, cueing its articulation when possible, listening with your eyes to body language, your mind for omission or aspects of sound articulation that contradict spoken words.

If you are doing all that you can’t really listen to anything else, except perhaps the inner commentary that helps you to see what is divergent and home in on its relevance to the person, so that you permit them to say it. That latter point is made because people often talk over themselves till given permission to say what they really feel they need to say.

But, of course, the question does not mean that. It understands by work something sufficiently low-key and capable of being done with half-or-less attention. We need to say in answer Beethoven, Chopin or Prince; something we are permitted to divide our attention on to, whether as the matter of listening or the background stimulation we need to avoid boredom and alienation.

Truly divided attention is needed in some arenas. I instanced social work but whilst the psychologist Broadbent studied divided attention, he referred to the need of air traffic controllers to divide attention to numerous channels of different input to successfully aid in managing an airport. He used the tool of dichotic listening to study it, wherein, by using different stimuli entering each ear, controlled by use of a headpiece, he could judge the variation in persons in being able to utilise the channels serially and/or simultaneously.

When I was subjected to this experiment I failed miserably because I think of my overwhelming anxiety about the subjection involved in the experiment. In truth I heard only my anxiety and nothing else. But, given this limitation, either of me or the experimental procedure, dichotic listening is again not what we are asked to talk about here.

The issue in this question is to assume that work is repetitive skill and needs alleviation of another interest, even it be the soothing effect of something already well known to you and not demanding immediate attention. I find that alien to me. But why?

I think the reason is that sensory input makes demands, and my expectation is that even the familiar, such as a favoured piece of music, may contain surprises – of meanings not heard before or modulations subtler than ever before noticed. When attention is truly divided in that way, both channels of input demand work in their processing. This is why I find watching TV overwhelming where so many channels compete, especially if the inputs are divergent rather than aids to interpretation at a deeper level, in the use of atmospheric. ‘music’ for instance, to increase tension.

Now I am aware that what I describe here is possibly a facet of my own neuro-divergence, but I think that even exceptions to norms can illuminate norms. The need to listen to anything different from ‘work’ is really a comment on the alienation associated with work in modern specialised contexts. In the future such work will be that taken over by AI for it is really the stuff of algorithms, deeply learned regular processes stored in the cerebellum for ease of automatic access and already therefore, in analogy, computerised. Driving is often done in this way and is the cause of accidents, sometimes fatal ones.

So no answer to the question. For if work is truly work, what I listen out for are the things which drive it into the arena of the worthwhile and valuable to me, my share in its pleasures. But most work is done in the interests, often narrowed to purely monetary interests, of self and others (more often largely for the faceless corporate other) and this is like asking – what kind of opiate works best in a world not interested in containing individuals who want to find meaning in their quotidian lives.

My, I am a serious boy. Or is that bore?

All love. Steve.