Voice

Ever get the feeling you're talking to a brick wall when trying to communicate with your teens? Well, a new study suggests there may be some science to it, after finding that teenagers' brains start tuning out their mothers' voices around the age of 13. Researchers said that this is because they no longer find it “uniquely rewarding,” and instead tune into unfamiliar voices more.

The study by the Stanford School of Medicine used MRI brain scans to give the first detailed neurobiological explanation for how teenagers begin to separate from their parents. It suggests that when your teenagers don't seem to hear you, it's not simply that they don't want to clean their room or finish their homework—their brains aren't registering your voice the way they did in pre-teenage years.

Lead study author Daniel Abrams said, “Just as an infant knows to tune into her mother's voice, an adolescent knows to tune into novel voices. As a teen, you don't know you're doing this. You're just being you: You've got your friends and new companions and you want to spend time with them. Your mind is increasingly sensitive to and attracted to these unfamiliar voices.”

Researchers said, “The brain's shift toward new voices is an aspect of healthy maturation. A child becomes independent at some point, and that has to be precipitated by an underlying biological signal. This signal helps teens engage with the world and form connections which allow them to be socially adept outside their families.”

A study published in 2016 showed that children can identify their mother's voice with extremely high accuracy. Even fetuses in utero can recognize their mother's voice before they're born. Yet with adolescents their brains are tuning away from their mother’s voice in favor of voices they've never even heard.

Brain responses to voices increased with teenagers' age. In fact, the relationship was so strong researchers could use the information in adolescents' brain scans to predict how old they were. When teens appear to be rebelling by not listening to their parents, it is because they are wired to pay more attention to voices outside their home.

For over half a century, the voice of Oswald Laurence was heard on the Underground Transit System in London. He made a simple but needed public safety announcement, warning passengers to "Mind the gap."

When Oswald passed away in 2007, his widow Margret felt heartbroken and alone. She missed Oswald's love and zest for life. To ease her pain, Margret would visit the Embankment Station, sit on the platform, and listen to her beloved husband's voice saying, “Mind the gap.” Then, one day in September 2012, she sat down, and his voice was gone.

In modernizing their systems, the London Underground officials had replaced Oswald's voice with an electronic recording. Margret was distressed by the change and requested a copy of Oswald's recording, so she could listen to it at home.

When the London Underground staff learned of Margret's story, they were moved by an extraordinary act of compassion and kindness. The staff got past all the red tape, searched through the archives until they found Oswald’s recording, and then had it digitized. It was also decided to continue with Oswald’s recording at the stop nearest to Margret's home. Today, if you find yourself at the Embankment Station on the Northern Line of the London Underground, you will still hear the 1950 recording of Oswald Laurence's voice.

Has that message saved lives? Who knows? But has that message touched at least one life? Absolutely. In fact, that’s why it’s still there. One act of kindness can change a life!

You can watch the short video and hear Oswald’s voice here.

The voice of E.T. (Extra-Terrestrial), in Steven Spielberg's film, was something of a problem. Technicians could not come up with a voice to match the appearance of the model star of the film. Spielberg’s technician, working on the film, happened to be in a store one day when he heard a lady talking to the shop assistant. Her voice was exactly what he wanted. He stopped her on the way out, gave her his card, and said “come for an audition.”

Mrs. Welsh used to be a speech trainer. But decades of cigarette smoking caused her voice to crack up, leaving her croaky and gasping for breath--exactly what Spielberg had in mind. And so Pat Welsh, an unknown American housewife, became part of one of the biggest money-making movies of all time.

Possible Preaching Angle:

All believers are called to speak on behalf of God. But when God called Moses to be his voice to Pharaoh, Moses replied, “Lord, I get tongue-tied, and my words get tangled.” Jeremiah pleaded “I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth.” And what’s your excuse? You don’t know enough? You’re not old enough, your too old, you’re not mature enough? However, those excuses don’t matter to God who has a unique place of service specifically for you. What he wants is a willing heart and an open mind.

The President of the U.S. has the power to push text messages to just about every smartphone in America, anytime he deems it necessary. Who knew? The Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system was born of President Bush's frustration with the Federal Emergency Management Agency's response during Hurricane Katrina, and has morphed since. If you've ever received one of these alerts, it was probably about a missing child Amber alert or a severe weather warning.

But buried in the documents describing its function is this fact: The President of the United States can mass-message the entire phone-carrying nation at the same time whenever he deems it necessary. Oddly enough, if you do get a presidential emergency alert and you're on the phone, it won't show up until after you've finished your conversation. I guess the apocalypse can wait?

Preaching Angle: This illustrates the profound truth that God is in instantaneous and personal contact with every believer, at any time, under any circumstances, by his Spirit.

Doctors warn that a steady onslaught of loud noise, particularly through ear buds, is damaging the hearing of a generation wired for sound, although they may not realize it for years. More than 1 billion young people are at risk of hearing loss because of personal audio devices, such as smartphones, and damaging levels of sound at entertainment venues like electronic dance music festivals, where noise levels can top 120 decibels for hours, according to the World Health Organization.

"Probably the largest cause [of hearing damage] is millennials using earbuds and [smartphones]," says Dr. Sreekant Cherukuri, an ear, nose, and throat specialist. Hearing loss among today's teens is about 30 percent higher than in the 1980s and 1990s, Cherukuri estimates.

"You (once) had a Walkman with two AA batteries and headphones that went over your ears," he told NBC News. "At high volume, the sound was so distorted and the battery life was poor. Nowadays, we have smart phones that are extremely complex computers with high-level fidelity."

The damage happens when sound travels from the earbud deep inside your ear to the cochlea, where some 20,000 hair cells transmit the sound to the brain. But if the sound is too loud, and listened to for too long, it can damage those hair cells, or worse, cause them to die off. Permanent damage can happen in minutes, experts say.

Possible Preaching Angles: Physical hearing loss is a serious situation, but spiritual hearing loss is devastating. Will anyone in the wired generation be able to hear the voice of God amidst the constant barrage of noise?

In1973 the journal Science published an article titled "On Being Sane in Insane Places." It described an experiment in which eight "fake" patients with no history of mental illness went undercover and checked themselves into a few psychiatric hospitals across the United States. All of them had the same complaint: they told medical staff that they regularly "heard voices." Apart from this fabrication they behaved normally and recounted their own (normal) past experiences and medical histories.

Nonetheless, all of them were diagnosed as schizophrenic (except one, who was diagnosed with "manic-depressive psychosis"), hospitalized for up to two months, and prescribed antipsychotic medications (which they did not swallow). Once admitted to the mental wards, they continued to speak and behave normally; they reported to the medical staff that their hallucinated voices had disappeared and that they felt fine. They even kept notes on their experiment, quite openly (this was registered in the nursing notes for one of the fake patients as "writing behavior").

This experiment, designed by David Rosenhan, a Stanford psychologist and one of the fake patients, found that the single symptom of "hearing voices" could suffice for an immediate, categorical diagnosis of mental illness even in the absence of any other symptoms or abnormalities of behavior. In other words, "hearing voices" could only have one explanation—you're crazy.

Possible Preaching Angles: Of course mental illness is a reality, but at times smart people in our society are quick to judge that Christians who hear from God are also crazy or deluded.