Whole Body Listening – A first attempt to find the science to back a change

I can appreciate the appeal of Whole Body Listening. I first came across the strategy in the early 2000s when working as a school psychologist and later discovered that it had been around since, or even before, the ’70s—no one quite knows. At the time, I was a huge advocate of the model. For years, in fact, I’d included it as a lesson plan and poster in the original Social Stencil program (2009–2018).

Initially, like many, I presumed that listening was most effective when a student was still, quiet, and looking at the speaker — to hear and see both auditory and visual information. For many learners, this is their most comfortable position to attend and listen.

However, the students we were most invested in adopting the Whole Body Listening strategy were the students who didn’t adopt this position naturally. For reasons we didn’t understand at the time, many autistic and ADHD students didn’t seem to notice that stillness, sitting, quiet, and looking were most effective for listening and learning.

Hence, Whole Body Listening presented as a powerful, clear visual tool, explicitly articulating the core behaviours assumed to be instrumental for effective listening. It was as simple as that. In time, we also realised that when everyone demonstrated Whole Body Listening collectively, it served as a fabulous behaviour management tool. And this is where Whole Body Listening became particularly popular and instrumental to the teaching methodology of many—including myself at the time.

What happened next was decades of effort from neurodivergent children trying their darndest to train their bodies and minds to listen just like everyone else, just as they had been taught. What’s so wrong with that?

Many neurodivergent adults who experienced the Whole Body Listen strategy as children have bravely expressed their distress and distraction when trying to keep their bodies still, quiet, and looking. Full disclosure: some of those adults would have learnt it from me.

More recently, 12-year-old Charlie from Bendigo took to social media, advocating to change Whole Body Listening in schools via a petition and letter to principals (See force4goodcollective.org). In Charlie’s words, “I always wanted to find a way to stop it because I’ve always known it’s been troubling a lot of us.”

I’m excited by Charlie’s advocacy because I’ve been advocating for an alternative too. You see, while rewriting Social Stencil to become neuroaffirming, I spent time learning from incredible neuroaffirming advocates (special mention to Sandhya Menon (Onwards and Upwards psychology), Em (Neurowild), Rebecca Challoner (My Spirited Child) and Christina Keeble. (Christina Keeble Consulting). From that learning, I created a Connected Listening poster and a Listening for Learning poster, to acknowledge and support different listening styles across the classroom. As I followed Charlie’s petition I wondered whether we could help move this change forward if we could understand the science that might explain why whole body listening is problematic for some?

Without being a biologist, audiologist, or neuroscientist, my research is very elementary, but here’s what I’ve found so far.

“Listening is supported by coordinated activity across interconnected neural networks throughout the brain. The process begins when sound waves enter the ear and are converted into electrical signals, which then travel through the brainstem to the auditory cortex” (Rost, 2024).

However, there’s a key distinction between simply hearing sound and actually processing it — and that distinction depends on attention.

“When the listener perceives a stimulus as meaningful (e.g., a teacher speaking), the brain's attention system focuses on that stimulus to activate the regions necessary for processing it” (Eldar et al., 2013). This attentional focus stimulates the neurons and neural pathways involved in understanding (Price & Moncrieff, 2021). In this way, attention acts as the gateway to comprehension (Taylor & Fiske, 2021).

This process is regulated by the thalamus, located in the midbrain. Because the thalamus cannot process multiple stimuli simultaneously, it filters incoming information to ensure energy is used efficiently (Radonovic & Mansur, 2013).

As a result, attention can be directed to only one source at a time. When multiple stimuli are present, selective attention is engaged — deactivating one focus in order to activate another. This mechanism helps prevent cognitive overload and allows working memory to function more effectively (Gazzaley & Nobre, 2012).

So if we consider what Charlie is describing when he's Whole Body Listening (you can hear the full podcast at The Deep Dive Podcast), I wonder whether his focus on “doing it right” — keeping his eyes forward, body still, and so on — becomes the primary target of his attention. In that case, it’s likely that his thalamus and working memory are occupied with monitoring his body, rather than processing the teacher’s words. If so, the effort to follow the rules of Whole Body Listening may actually be diverting attention away from listening itself.

I hope this paper reaches someone with expertise in listening and attention, who can help us understand the science behind the lived experiences neurodivergent people are sharing so that we can best understand how to support all of the learners in our classrooms. 

A special thank you to Sarah Middleton from www.brilliantlittlegems.com.au for the inspiration and collaboration!

References:

Eldar, E., Cohen, H., & Bar-Haim, Y. (2013). Neural mechanisms of selective attention and emotion regulation: A unified framework for understanding anxiety. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 37(8), 1546–1554. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2013.06.004

Gazzaley, A., & Nobre, A. C. (2012). Top-down modulation: Bridging selective attention and working memory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(2), 129–135. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2011.11.014

Price, L. M., & Moncrieff, D. (2021). Auditory attention and processing: The role of neural networks. Journal of Communication Disorders, 89, 106051. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcomdis.2020.106051

Radonovic, M., & Mansur, L. L. (2013). Brain mechanisms of attention: A neuropsychological perspective. Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria, 71(5), 313–319. https://doi.org/10.1590/0004-282X20130024

Rost, M.; Candlin, C. N. Listening in Language Learning. [s. l.]: Taylor and Francis, 2014. Disponível em: https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=e855a15b-9882-3925-9d85-46739d733fcb. Acesso em: 13 maio. 2025.

Fiske, S. T.; Taylor, S. E.; Social Cognition : From brains to culture Ed. 4. [s. l.], 2020. Disponível em: https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=97ee7d87-2c04-3bdc-903f-cc1fb1b0286e. Acesso em: 13 maio. 2025.