Thank You for Listening … But Did You Truly Understand Me?
Alan R. Ehrlich
Past President and Chair (Listening Disorders),
Global Listening Centre.
The Global Listening Centre’s Thank You for Listening Campaign 2026 highlights listening’s transformative power. It reminds us that meaningful change often begins not with speaking louder but with listening more deeply.
The GLC’s Thank You for Listening campaign was a great success. It highlighted the enormous power of listening: a source of hope that, when practiced deeply, creates a unique opportunity for understanding, empathy, and healing. By acknowledging others’ willingness to listen, we spotlight the importance of this skill in building and maintaining relationships through the simplest yet most complex communication process we have: speaking and listening.
While we thank those around us for listening, many conversations end up in misunderstandings. These might be critical situations like international negotiations, or they might result in a ‘night in the doghouse’ for an unsuspecting spouse.
Over the past 20+ years, I’ve researched various listening disorders across multiple fields, including anatomy, audiology, physiology, psychology, and neuroscience. Each discipline offers its own perspective on what constitutes a listening disorder, often labeling many individuals. For instance, hearing loss affects about 20% of the U.S. population—one in five people—causing communication challenges (Lin et al., 2011). Different disorders impact various age groups, making Listening Disorders a significant concern in both personal and professional contexts.
Can we really listen more deeply? Training programs focus on active listening, reflective recapitulation, and open questioning, but they rarely address the core question: what is our cognitive response to what we hear, and why does our understanding often diverge from the speaker’s original message?
I’ve asked numerous professionals this question, and their common responses are, “I try to listen carefully.” “I pay attention.” “I take notes.” “I check my understanding.” These responses implicitly assume that listening is fundamentally about effort and technique. The idea is that by listening more intently, focusing more clearly, and applying effective communication skills, they’ll better understand what was said.
However, there’s a commonly overlooked listening disorder that isn’t reflected in statistics because it affects us all personally. Everyone is impacted—100% of people—and it pertains to how our brains interpret sounds. I refer to it as the listener’s Umwelt.
The listener’s Umwelt adds another dimension to listening, as our entire biography becomes part of the process. “We Hear What We Expect to Hear” (Ehrlich, 2026) uncovers a major source of listening distortion.
Over the past 10 years, I have incorporated the concept of an Umwelt into my listening programs. Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll introduced the term in the early 20th century to describe the subjective, self-centered perceptual world each organism experiences. This world is not merely external reality; it is shaped by the organism’s sensory and cognitive tools, which determine what it can perceive.
Since Uexküll’s initial work, the concept has been expanded, applied, and reinterpreted across fields such as biology, philosophy, semiotics, and cognitive science. I propose extending it further into our domain, suggesting that every listener brings a personal, biographical Umwelt to their listening experiences, shaped not only by biology but also by accumulated professional and personal experience. Thus, the Umwelt fundamentally shapes what we hear.
The components of the listener’s Umwelt include: memories and past experiences, values and beliefs, expectations and assumptions, attitudes and prejudices, and individual mental frameworks.
Uexküll’s fundamental idea is that perception is an active process, not merely the passive reception of environmental input. The perceiver’s traits shape it, determining which environmental features can be experienced and which are absent. This applies whether these traits are biological or acquired through experience (biographical). Ultimately, the perceiver exists within a subjective universe distinct from others, largely unseen from the perceiver’s own perspective.
The accumulation of biographical experiences that forms the listener’s Umwelt operates through well-established mechanisms in cognitive psychology, social psychology, and neuroscience. These include constructive memory (Bartlett, 1932), schema activation, confirmation bias (Nickerson, 1998), attitudinal priming (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995), and motivated reasoning that aligns new information with existing beliefs (Kunda, 1990). Each mechanism shapes the listener’s perceptual world before the speaker begins, emphasizing some signals and downplaying others, often without conscious awareness.
A Prediction Engine!
Why is the Umwelt so important to our study of what we hear? Because the brain, at its core, is a prediction engine. The main argument is that distorted listening isn’t a psychological anomaly but a natural outcome of a brain primarily designed to predict rather than record information. The predictive processing model, based on the research of Friston, Clark, Hohwy, and others, builds on the historical idea of unconscious inference introduced by Helmholtz and Gregory. This framework provides the mechanistic explanation needed to view the Umwelt concept as more than just a metaphor (Clark, 2013; Gregory, 1997; Friston, 2019; Hohwy, 2013).
Predictive processing posits that the brain operates as a hierarchical prediction engine. Rather than passively receiving sensory information and analyzing it afterward, the brain continuously anticipates what it expects to perceive. These forecasts are transmitted “downward” through sensory-processing layers to align with incoming signals. At each stage, the brain stores the discrepancy between its prediction and the actual sensory input, known as the prediction error.
The Umwelt represents the accumulated prior knowledge—the personal and professional framework that shapes predictions. Top-down processing, guided by expectations, interacts dynamically with bottom-up processing, driven by incoming data. In professional settings, top-down dominance is often favored. The expert paradox explains how, in experienced listeners, strong priors aid both pattern recognition and enforcement. Attention functions as a form of precision weighting, shaped equally by prior expectations and incoming signals. Perceptual illusions clearly show that perceptual construction is not merely flawed listening but reflects the fundamental way all listening functions.
Distorted Listening
The Umwelt may fail the listener in various ways, but these can be categorized into six main types. This taxonomy is not merely a list of cognitive biases added to communication; it is a conceptually grounded framework that explains how the architecture outlined earlier leads to specific failure modes. Each mode arises from the same fundamental system, manifests uniquely in practice, and demands a different response.
Pattern One: Premature Closure
Premature closure is the most extensively documented and consequential pattern in the listening literature, and the one the predictive processing framework predicts most directly. It occurs when the listener’s generative model produces a prediction that fits the incoming signal well enough to suppress prediction error before the full signal has been registered—when the prior completes the diagnostic or interpretive story before the patient or student has finished telling it. As a result, the listener stops searching for alternative explanations or additional information, settling on the first interpretation that fits the prior well enough. The relationship to anchoring bias (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) is direct and requires explicit acknowledgment. Anchoring is the tendency for an initial piece of information to exert disproportionate influence on subsequent judgment, even when the anchor is arbitrary or unreliable. Premature closure is anchoring applied to the diagnostic or interpretive process: the first plausible hypothesis becomes the anchor around which subsequent information is organized, and information inconsistent with it tends to be discounted, reinterpreted, or ignored.
Pattern Two: Lexical Substitution
Lexical substitution occurs when the listener hears a word or phrase that differs from what the speaker actually produced—not because the acoustic signal was too degraded to process accurately, but because the practitioner’s top-down lexical and semantic predictions generated a high-probability candidate that displaced the actual word before it was fully registered. The result is a perception that is coherent and linguistically plausible within the listener’s framework, yet demonstrably at variance with what was said.
The psycholinguistic evidence for this pattern is among the most direct in the entire taxonomy. Marslen-Wilson’s (Marslen-Wilson et al., 1988) work on cohort theory and spoken word recognition demonstrated that lexical access in normal speech perception begins before the acoustic input is complete: the brain selects candidate words based on the first phonemes of the spoken sequence, using lexical and contextual knowledge to narrow the candidate set before the word has finished arriving.
Pattern Three: Emotional Filtering
Emotional filtering describes the systematic alteration of the weight assigned to emotionally charged signal content, in either direction: the practitioner’s prior causes them to assign lower precision to emotional or distress-related signals than their clinical or educational significance warrants, or, less commonly, to assign higher precision than is appropriate. In the more prevalent and clinically consequential downward direction, emotional filtering causes the listener to hear the content of a speaker’s distress communication, including the factual symptoms, the functional impairments, and the treatment-relevant information, while failing to register the emotional dimension as a signal in its own right, one that bears directly on the patient’s experience, treatment engagement, and the practitioner-patient relationship.
The clinical communication research base for this pattern is substantial and disturbing. Marvel and colleagues’ (Marvel et al., 1999) widely cited study of physician consultation behavior found that physicians redirected patients from their initial concern within a median of twenty-three seconds after the consultation opened—a finding consistent with premature closure and with emotional filtering, in which the practitioner’s prior knowledge of what constitutes a clinically relevant signal steers attention away from the expressed concern toward confirmable symptom information. Langewitz and colleagues’ (Langewitz et al., 2002) complementary study found that when patients were allowed to speak without interruption until they indicated completion, the median time was ninety-two seconds, and that most patients included clinically relevant information in the final portions of their opening account. The information filtered out by the twenty-three-second redirection was not trivial.
Pattern Four: The Reflecting Pool Problem
The reflecting pool problem takes its name from the phenomenon it describes: the listener who appears to be listening to the other person but is, in fact, primarily attending to their own internal processing, including formulating, planning, evaluating, and responding. From the outside, the encounter appears to be listening. But the practitioner’s attention is directed primarily at the reflection in the pool, their own cognitive activity, rather than at the person standing on the other side.
Pattern Five: Narrative Hijacking
Narrative hijacking occurs when the practitioner’s prior, specifically its stored narrative templates (the typical stories that presentations, conditions, or professional situations generate), imposes a structure on the patient’s or student’s account that the patient or student did not intend and may not recognize. The practitioner replaces the patient’s story with their own account of what this kind of patient’s story typically is. The resulting account may be clinically coherent and professionally familiar, but it is the practitioner’s narrative rather than the patient’s, and the gap between the two may be the most clinically important aspect of the consultation (Heritage & Maynard, 2006).
In an educational setting, this dynamic closely aligns with what the literature describes as the Pygmalion effect (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968; Brooks, 2025) and its negative counterpart, the Golem effect (Babad et al., 1982): the teacher’s expectation shapes both what they hear and, over time, what the student produces in response to being heard in that way.
Pattern Six: The Halo-and-Horn Effect in Listening
The halo-and-horn effect in listening explains how a general positive (halo) or negative (horn) attitude can systematically affect how the evaluator values specific communications from the person being evaluated (Thorndike, 1920). A practitioner with a positive initial assessment of a patient or student tends to communicate more precisely, remember and register their statements better, interpret ambiguous signals more favorably, and be less likely to question or challenge apparent inconsistencies. Conversely, a practitioner with a negative initial assessment tends to do the opposite. This phenomenon is not due to flawed reasoning following accurate perception but results from a structured bias in perception itself (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).
The six patterns described in the preceding sections have been presented individually for clarity. In practice, they do not operate in isolation. They compound, trigger, and reinforce one another, producing listening failures that are considerably more serious than any single pattern considered in isolation. Understanding the interaction effects is as important as understanding the patterns themselves.
Not every case of listening failure fits these six patterns. Communication is complex, and its failures have multiple causes. I do not claim these six patterns cover all possibilities—there may be others that are less common, harder to identify, or less well supported by evidence. While the patterns may not be mutually exclusive in theory, recognizing them is useful in practice. Additionally, identifying a pattern does not automatically mean you can correct it: awareness is essential but not sufficient for change.
As we thank those around us for listening, we must recognize the importance of accurate and effective listening. While the simple act of listening can calm a friend upset over a broken relationship, it may not be enough to diagnose a serious malady in a cancer patient or help a troubled student move forward in their education.
“Thank You for Listening” has been an incredible success. As leaders in interpersonal communication, let’s keep thanking those who listen and consider the individual nuances that can trigger misunderstandings.
