Easy Listening

Sometimes, self-directed learners treat audiobooks and podcasts like the lectures in a conventional college course. We listen intently, take notes, challenge assertions, check facts, and read complementary works. On other occasions, we play audio programs of a serious sort while doing something else.

People who study the science of learning (Robert and Elizabeth Björk come to mind) tell us that deliberate engagement will yield more in the way of edification than casual listening. Nonetheless, a learned monologue or erudite discussion playing in the background offers a number of benefits to the brain attached to a busy body (even if the business at hand consists of falling asleep.)

Casual listening exposes us to the rhythm and inflections, as well as the patterns and conventions, of formal speech. Thus, at the very least, it makes those things more familiar than they would otherwise be, thereby increasing both our ability to engage the the ideas of others and the ease with which we assemble thoughts of our own. In other words, the inadvertent eavesdropping that occurs as we pay imperfect attention to a parcel of prose improves our acquaintance with both the elements of elevated language and the frameworks used to hold them together.

This, of course, requires that the audio program in question repeat the well-spoken, well-chosen, well-prepared speech of articulate people. Thus, the deliberate easy listener will eschew recordings of chatty, impromptu, gabfests in favor of scripted monologues (of the type found on Defragged History), deliberate dialogues (like those of The Rest is History), and curated conversations (like those epitomized by In Our Time.)

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