The Cure for Listening
This morning I emailed this quick little note taking issue with Colorado Public Radio regarding a segment on their show Colorado Matters:
Dear Colorado Matters team,
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Thank you for your segment “Preventing Schizophrenia in Utero” wherein Ryan Warner interviewed Psychiatry Professor Randy Ross. I believe the study of this disease that causes so much suffering is very important, however, I found many things about this report very disturbing.
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I happen to think that the appreciation of sensory input from the surrounding environment, especially sound, is a very important and healthy thing. The implication and tone of the segment were that listening to background noise is somehow bad or wrong, and might lead to illness. There was no distinction between the ability to ignore sound and the ability to direct attention at sound, both of which are important to human development. I can imagine parents hearing this report and discouraging their children from listening to background sounds. This would be awful, I think we already have a cultural tendency to ignore our surroundings. Listening to background noises is not something that needs to be “cured”.
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Further, the segment did not do a very good job at all in firmly establishing an evidential link between the presentation of this specific reaction to sound in infants and later development of schizophrenia in adults.
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C. Reider
