The mind works by ear

The primary reason name selection errors are so common is that executives live in an ocean of paper. Letters, memos, reports. Swimming in the Xerox sea, it’s easy to forget that the mind works aurally. To utter a word, we first translate the letters into sounds. Which is why beginners move their lips when they read. When you were a child, you first learned to speak and then to read. And you learned to read slowly and laboriously by saying the words out loud as you forced your mind to connect the written word with the aural sound stored in the brain. By comparison, learning to speak requires much less effort than learning to read.

We store sounds directly and then play them back in various combinations as our mental dexterity improves. As you grow up, you learn to translate written words into the aural language needed by the brain so rapidly that you are unaware the translation process is taking place. Then you read in the paper that 80 percent of learning takes place through the eyes. Of course it does. But reading is only a portion of the learning process. Much learning occurs from visual clues which do not involve reading in the conventional sense at all. As when you learn the emotional state of another person by “reading” body clues. 

When words are read, they are not understood until the visual/verbal translator in your brain takes over to make aural sense out of what you have seen. In the same way, a musician learns to read music and hear the sound in his or her head, just as if someone were actually playing the tune on an instrument. Try to memorize a poem without reading it out loud. It’s far easier to memorize written material if we reinforce the aural component, the working language of the brain. Which is why not only names but also headlines, slogans, and themes should be examined for their aural qualities. Even if you plan to use them in printed material only. Did you think that Hubert and Elmer were bad names? If so, you must have translated the printed words into their aural equivalents. Because Hubert and Elmer don’t look bad. They just sound bad. In a way, it’s a shame that the print media (newspapers, magazines, outdoor advertising) came first and radio second. Radio is really the primal media. And print is the higher-level abstraction. Messages would “sound better” in print if they were designed for radio first. Yet we usually do the reverse. We work first in print and then in the broadcast media.

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