Last night at dinner with our friends Linda and Turner, I had an insight into how the magic of speech reading works. Turner is a tennis pro who has traveled the world; he is a collector and breeder of rare praying mantises; he is the owner of a collection of 300 boomerangs which he is skilled at throwing and catching; and he is a trained magician. When Turner showed us some amazing sleight-of-hand tricks, I realized they rely on the same mechanism in the brain that switches on and off when you learn to speech-read. Speech reading truly is a magical process. When I lost one of my hearing aids a week ago, I thought about crawling under the covers and hiding until my audiologist could get replacements delivered. I didn’t have a clue about how I would cope. But instead of hiding, I gamely went about my business. To my surprise, I discovered that in the three years since I lost most of my hearing, I’ve learned to cope far better than I knew. Like magic, my speech-reading skills have improved dramatically.
I’ve adopted strategies for getting the information I need without straining as much as I used to, and I’ve learned to let some things go without stressing as much as I used to. With only one hearing aid, I made it through a week of meetings, I survived a number of phone calls, and I even saw and enjoyed a play. Speech reading enables you to understand and communicate in an entirely new way by extrapolating context from bits and scraps of information. Rather than processing all the data coming to you in an orderly, linear way, you grab as many pertinent facts as you can, create a mental map that you hope approximates the rough terrain of the conversation, then gradually connect the dots until a coherent, understandable landscape emerges. Sometimes it puts you on a time delay (I’m constantly embarrassing myself by laughing at jokes after everyone’s moved on to the next topic), but as you get better there are more instances where you keep up with the natural flow. Last night at dinner with our friends Linda and Turner, I had an insight into how the magic of speech reading works. Turner is a tennis pro who has traveled the world; he is a collector and breeder of rare praying mantises; he is the owner of a collection of 300 boomerangs which he is skilled at throwing and catching; and he is a trained magician. When Turner showed us some amazing sleight-of-hand tricks, I realized they rely on the same mechanism in the brain that switches on and off when you learn to speech-read.
Turner’s ability to make a quarter disappear from one hand, appear in the other and pop out of our ears was marvelous. Sleight-of-hand relies on people’s brains being wired to follow the principal action in front of their eyes while screening out images it believes are irrelevant. The magician tricks the viewer into following hand movements that the eye mistakenly interprets as important while disguising the more relevant action of switching the coin from one hand to another. Thus the magician relies on the brain’s natural, automatic filtering mechanism to render the coin “invisible.” Similarly, when the brain operates with input from two good ears, it is accustomed to processing information in a linear way: it collects the facts as they come in; it sorts and highlights the ones it thinks are relevant; and it filters out, or renders invisible, the irrelevant facts. It’s a reactive process. But when the ears aren’t working properly and the brain loses that complete, continuous flow of information, it rewires itself to operate in a different way. It becomes more proactive, reaching out for whatever bits of information it can get and withholding judgment on their relevance.
The brain stores all that information in an array that it accesses multiple times until it can test the relevance of the information against all the new facts coming into the brain. Only when relevance is clear and understanding emerges does the brain cast aside the less useful information. At the same time, your brain widens its bandwidth for the information it takes in, assimilating and assessing non-verbal elements such as the body language of the speaker and everyone else in the room. Successful speech reading, then, is like training your brain to watch everything the magician is doing, versus only the things he wants you to see. Maybe you don’t figure out how he does the trick right away, but eventually you do, because you’ve observed all the magician’s actions, including seemingly irrelevant actions, and you put together the pieces of what you’ve observed. Your brain doesn’t filter the information for you, narrowing down to a trickle the seemingly relevant information it wants you to focus on. Rather, it actively culls all the information it can get and works overtime on it for you. It’s an amazing process that is magical in its own right, because sometimes, when it’s really working well, you’re the only one in the room who really understood what actually went on.