Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
We retain just 25 percent
Listening and understanding
Listening is the way into understanding, and several forces have been wearing it down.
Recording and noise
Recording came first: writing, then audio recording, and now video recording. Once words could be saved and replayed, the premium on accurate, careful listening simply disappeared.
The world has also grown so noisy, with a cacophony of sights and sounds, that listening is tiring. Many people take refuge in headphones, which turn big public spaces with a shared soundscape into millions of tiny personal sound bubbles. In that arrangement, nobody is listening to anybody.
Shrinking patience
Patience has shrunk too. People want sound bites instead of oratory, and personal broadcasting is replacing the art of conversation.
How did writing change listening?
In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates tells the story of the god Thoth offering writing to the Egyptian king Thamus, who warns that it will breed forgetfulness in those who learn it. In the 1930s, Milman Parry and Albert Lord recorded South Slavic epic singers who performed songs thousands of lines long from memory. Lord's 1960 book The Singer of Tales built on that fieldwork to show how oral poets compose as they perform.
How did personal audio change shared sound?
Sony introduced the Walkman in Japan in 1979, and it let people carry a private soundtrack through public places. Sociologist Michael Bull spent years studying personal stereo and iPod users. He published his findings in books including Sound Moves in 2007.
Why does heard speech slip away so fast?
Sounds are held briefly in echoic memory, which experiments by Darwin, Turvey, and Crowder in 1972 placed at a few seconds. Only what gets attention moves on to working memory, which holds a handful of items at a time. Hermann Ebbinghaus's memory experiments in 1885 showed that forgetting is steepest in the first hours after learning.
More from TED
