Julian Treasure guided the audience at a recent TED.com conference in the art of listening.  I loved it; here are my excerpts.  The video is here.

“…we’re losing our listening. Why did I say that? Well there are a lot of reasons for this.

First of all, we invented ways of recording — first writing, then audio recording and now video recording as well. The premium on accurate and careful listening has simply disappeared.

Secondly, the world is now so noisy…it’s just hard to listen; it’s tiring to listen. Many people take refuge in headphones, but … in this scenario, nobody’s listening to anybody.