What is the difference between Listening and Hearing?

Hearing, or auditory perception, is the ability to perceive sounds by detecting vibrations, changes in the pressure of the surrounding medium through time, through an organ such as the ear. The academic field concerned with hearing is auditory science. Sound may be heard through solid, liquid, or gaseous matter while Listening is the ability to accurately receive and interpret messages in the communication process. Listening is key to all effective communication. Without the ability to listen effectively, messages are easily misunderstood. Effective listening is a skill that underpins all positive human relationships. There lies a great difference between hearing and listening as you can possibly hear any sound reaching to your ears, be it useful or useless while you only listen to talks or sounds that you consider useful and you need to put efforts into listening and it requires proper skills to listen and undertsand something otherwise it can be misunderstood to much extent. And this misunderstanding causes MISCOMMUNICATION which is an uninvited careless problem in communication.

1. Hearing and Listening uses both your ears.
2. Hearing is receiving sound waves through your ears, while listening means hearing and understanding what you’ve heard.
3. Hearing is part of the five senses, while listening is a choice to hear and analyse what you hear.
4. Hearing is using your ears only, while listening is using your body’s other senses.
5. Listening is observing other’s behavior that can add meaning to the message, while hearing is simply receiving sound vibrations.
6. Listening can build better relationships with others, while hearing cannot.

Hearing is an accidental and automatic brain response to sound that requires no effort. We are surrounded by sounds most of the time. For example, we are accustomed to the sounds of airplanes, lawn mowers, furnace blowers, the rattling of pots and pans, and so on. We hear those incidental sounds and, unless we have a reason to do otherwise, we train ourselves to ignore them. We learn to filter out sounds that mean little to us, just as we choose to hear our ringing cell phones and other sounds that are more important to us.

Listening, on the other hand, is purposeful and focused rather than accidental. As a result, it requires motivation and effort. Listening, at its best, is active, focused, concentrated attention for the purpose of understanding the meanings expressed by a speaker. We do not always listen at our best, however, and later in this chapter we will examine some of the reasons why and some strategies for becoming more active critical listeners.

According to medical terms, Hearing and listening are not the same thing. Hearing is the act of perceiving sound. It is involuntary and simply refers to the reception of aural stimuli. Listening is a selective activity which involves the reception and the interpretation of aural stimuli. Making sense of what you are hearing.

Listening is different than hearing because it involves much more than the reception of sound by the ear. Instead, listening is an active process where the ear receives information and the brain processes it in ways that make it understandable and utilized by the listener and ultimately the sender of the information.

More than a one-way flow of information from someone's mouth to another person's ears, it is much more complicated. That's why it is so frequently overlooked. It takes great and constant effort.