Challenge Your Assumptions: Weird Or Different?

I strongly believe that as a professional communicator, it is my duty to challenge my own assumptions and to constantly be on guard against the bias of my own perceptions.

Because I view the world in a certain way, it is my professional obligation to force myself to see through others’ eyes in order to be the best I can be at what I do. My first revelation with this came upon reading Music, The Brain, And Ecstasyby Robert Jourdain.

In it, Jourdain explains why we don’t recognize our own voices on audio recordings:

When you speak or sing, sound travels not only from your lips to your pinnae, but also straight through your head to the inner ear. In a sense, you hear yourself twice, once through the ear canal and once through bone. Bone conduction makes the sound louder than it would be otherwise, and changes the frequency content. This explains why we don’t recognize tape recordings of our own voices. A recording contains only part of the voice you normally hear. No one else can ever hear your voice as you do.

He also explains why some eastern or African music sounds like so much noise to Western ears: The musical forms they employ are literally alien to our ears; we are not culturally attuned to that form of music because we rarely listen to it.

The following Ted Talk by CD Baby founder Derek Sivers, reinforces the point:

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