It is great to communicate, but there is a limit to how much one person can hear in any given moment - I mean: really hear. Really hearing something involves more than simply detecting sounds. Really hearing involves thinking about those sounds to determine what they mean. Hearing and understanding is the essence of one of life's simple pleasures, the joy of a good conversation.

However, when too much information is thrown at us at once it can be a very unpleasant experience. That's because we must think to effectively hear, and we can only think of just so much at one time. The human brain is amazing, but is still finite, with limited processing power. Hearing then, involves more that just detecting sounds. Really hearing requires adequate attention to process and comprehend information. Today, there is an unprecedented amount of information being blasted at us constantly. Far more information than any one person could possibly process. We call that "information overload."

How do you handle information overload? We usually interpret information overload as confusion, not knowing what information stream to follow, jumping from one to another and ending up with a jumbled mess. This triggers a response where we either stop listening altogether, or narrow our focus to whatever we deem to be most important to follow. This involves making a judgment in the moment about what is the most important thing to be listening to and focusing on. Once that judgment is made, we simply shut out the rest of the information. In other words, we stop listening by filtering out everything we have now deemed to be "unimportant."

That process works pretty well, except when it doesn't. If we filter out important information as unimportant by giving attention to something else, it could have disastrous consequences. Nothing reveals the importance of paying attention to the right information better than what happens when that capacity is missing or impaired.  

Example: texting while driving. Texting while driving is a very dangerous choice to make. There is a lot of information your brain must process to drive. Most of this information is within the scope of the average person to effectively process most of the time. However, you are going down the road at lethal speed in a field of vehicles which are also moving at lethal speed. One small miscalculation and a lethal accident can occur at any given moment. Surely, being a death defying activity, driving merits one's full attention.

Texting and Driving Statistics tell the story.

Texting While Driving Causes:

1. 1,600,000 accidents per year – National Safety Council
2. 330,000 injuries per year – Harvard Center for Risk Analysis Study
3. 11 teen deaths EVERY DAY – Ins. Institute for Hwy Safety Fatality Facts
4. Nearly 25% of ALL car accidents

Texting While Driving Is:

1. About 6 times more likely to cause an accident than driving intoxicated
2. The same as driving after 4 beers – National Hwy Transportation Safety Admin.
3. The number one driving distraction reported by teen drivers

Texting While Driving:

1. Makes you 23X more likely to crash – National Hwy Transportation Safety Admin.
2. Is the same as driving blind for 5 seconds at a time – VA. Tech Transportation Institute
3. Takes place by 800,000 drivers at any given time across the country
4. Slows your brake reaction speed by 18% – HumanFactors & Ergonomics Society
5. Leads to a 400% increase with eyes off the road

Judging from these texting-while-driving statistics above, we would have to conclude that people are focusing on the wrong information a lot of the time. Add to that the amount of information overload we are all facing, and it is little wonder that most of us feel that we are not being heard. If you have something to say, how do you break through the din of competing information enough to get people to really listen to your important information? Actually, that is a question I ask and try to answer just about every day. It isn't easy getting people to listen and really hear when they already have so many other things that they are focusing on.

If its hard for a fully-functional person to get through, imagine what its like for a person who cannot effectively hear or speak. According to the Gallaudet Research Institute 22 out of every 1,000 people have a severe hearing impairment or are deaf. Many deaf people also have some trouble speaking or are unable to effectively voice at all. That amounts to millions of people who are literally not being heard, and whose ability to interact in a normal way in society is functionally limited, or even non-existent, due to their disability. The isolation some of those people experience can be crushing. What happens to those folks?

One such person met Messiah, and the story is recorded in Mark 7. The outcome of that meeting resulted in a happy ending for that Deaf man, and brings hope of being heard to us all. Join us tonight at 8 PM CST at Tsiyon.Net for our online meeting, and hear something important about being heard.

Eliyahu ben David
Tsiyon.Org