Your hearing has a mind of its own. It can decide what you need to hear and what to ignore. For example, you can be in a noisy room, ignoring the conversation on the table next to you when suddenly someone will mention your name. And zoom: you’re now tuning in to their voice.

On a weekday, your hearing might wake you up with the central heating. But at the weekend you sleep right through it. Parents will wake at the faintest stirring of their newborn baby – but sleep through the movements of their partner.

The question is how? And can we learn to harness this power? The answer is selective hearing – a partnership between your brain and your hearing.

Brain & Hearing: Perfect Partners

Your brain listens out for key words or sounds that it thinks you need to know about. It’s like when airport security is told to look out for a suspicious person with blonde hair and brown eyes wearing a leather jacket. Yes, the security guard will pay attention to the other things going on, but as soon as a blonde-haired suspect comes into view, their attention is immediately focused. They may even pick up the phone and call up to headquarters for a plan of action.

It’s the same with our hearing. It locks in to key words or sounds and gets on the hot line to the decision making part of our brain. Certain sounds effectively take a shortcut so we can form an appropriate plan of action. But how does our brain decide what to lock on to?

Well some of it’s automatic. A bit like Pavlov’s dogs which salivated when they heard the bell ring, our brains associates certain sounds with specific meaning, just like the central heating announcing that it’s time to get up on a weekday.

Other sounds are locked onto because they have a strong emotional content for us. This especially true if we feel the sound is a threat to us – such as a creaking floorboard in the middle of the night. Or even a dripping tap when we’re trying to sleep!

But you can also choose what to listen to. Experiments have shown just how powerful this is – here’s how…

Try this Experiment

Get two friends to sit on each side of you and ask them to read from a different book or magazine simultaneously.

If your hearing’s as it should be, you should be able to choose which reading to follow; the other gets ignored. Your brain is actually making your hearing more sensitive to the ear you’re choosing to follow. You will be able to answer questions about your chosen reading, but not the other. How incredible is that?

But selective hearing gets even better.

Try the experiment again, using a different set of readings. But this time, the friend you ignored should be asked to interject your name somewhere randomly into their reading. You’ll still be ignoring their reading, but should find that as soon as your name is mentioned, you notice it and tune in!

What does this tell us? It tells us that your brain’s autopilot has kicked in again! So even though you are “directing your hearing”, your brain can still override it for things it considers super-important.

Scrambled Hearing

But there are times when selective hearing doesn’t work, when it’s difficult to lock onto the sound we want to hear when there’s other sounds going on: the old “cocktail party” problem. There are two main reasons why this happens. The first is to do with the brain. The second is to do with the ears.

With the brain, somebody’s hearing can be absolutely perfect when you measure it, but they have difficulty unscrambling the information. It’s a bit like dyslexia for the ears. Sometimes specially developed listening exercises can improve this.

There’s a Hole in My Hearing, dear Liza, dear Liza…

The second type is when the ears themselves do not have the ability to pick up all the sounds it’s expected to. This means that the information that the brain receives is therefore compromised, so it doesn’t have the detail it needs to unscramble the information.

This can usually be treated with modern hearing technology, which is designed to fill in the gaps in your hearing and makes sure your brain gets the information it needs to perform correctly.

Pseudo-Selective Hearing

Ironically, we often joke that somebody has selective hearing – meaning they don’t listen to us! But this is actually the opposite of selective hearing…

They’re not choosing to ignore us ( i.e. true selective hearing) – rather their hearing’s not complete enough to lock on to our voice as effortlessly as it’s supposed to. Hearing needs to be right to be able to SELECT what to listen to and what to tune out.

So if anyone accuses you of having selective hearing, they may have done you a favour by identifying a gap in your own hearing. So take it as an opportunity to get your hearing back to how it’s meant to be. Then you can begin again tapping into your brain’s amazing power of selective hearing.