It’s natural to take our ability to listen for granted. After all, we’ve been hearing and listening since before we were born. So when we encounter a person who can’t quite understand what we are talking about, it kind of baffles us. Listening skills are not homogeneous. Many, many people have some level of listening disorder that an make understanding difficult for them.
What is a listening disorder?
A listening disorder is any condition, physical, neuro-cognitive, psychological, or exogenous (external), that affects our hearing or auditory processing, by distorting, modifying, or otherwise altering the sounds that we hear or changing the meaning of the speaker’s message by various cognitive filters.
Examples would include:
- Physical – hearing loss;
- Neuro-cognitive – auditory processing disorder; language acquisition disorders
- Psychological – narcissistic behavior; depression;
- Exogenous – speaker understandability issues; noise; visual distractions
Of course each of these issues have different levels that affect our ability to effectively listen.
We will explore many of these as we grow this website.