Practical life exercises are the essence of the Montessori method. They are an essential process that begins with the integration of senses and movement, enabling a smooth transition to more advanced intellectual activities such as culture, language, and mathematics.
In particular, while Montessori education emphasizes the importance of sensory experiences, this time we discussed the sense of hearing from a scientific perspective.
We’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to share your comments!
Profile
Yati Obara
Editor-in-Chief, Scientific Montessori
Based in Japan, born in 1989. CEO of Motherhand and Co-Director of the nonprofit think tank Polymath Research. Holds an M.Eng. and is an AMI-certified teacher. Focused on Montessori developmental theory and AI. Mother of two.
Hiro Obara
Publisher, Scientific Montessori
Based in Japan, born in 1990. CEO of StudyX and Co-Director of the nonprofit think tank Polymath Research. Works as a software developer and game designer. Father of two.
Having ears, they hear not.
Yati
Today’s topic is “Practical Life.”
Hiro
I’d like to dig into the five senses this time.
Yati
Maria Montessori put it roughly like this. Nothing reaches the intellect that doesn’t first pass through the senses. A defect in the senses affects every faculty of the mind. In carpentry, it’s not just the hands and eyes being trained. In football, not just the legs and eyes. The whole body and mind are involved in any activity. So why is it that so many people, young and old, fail to see or hear what trained observers easily notice? Having eyes, they see not; having ears, they hear not. Imperfect knowledge comes from poor observation. That’s why the Montessori Children’s House prepares an environment where the mind naturally turns to what should be observed, and the sensory activities go hand in hand with Practical Life. Training becomes training for life. So, “knowledge begins with the senses.” Exploring the senses under the theme of Practical Life is, I believe, in keeping with Maria Montessori’s intent.
Hiro
Let’s start with the zero to three range. At birth, babies can’t really see. Vision is almost nonexistent, and all they can perceive is sound.
Yati
Right. Sound is heard even in the womb.
Hiro
Exactly. And there’s touch and the sense of warmth. Babies sense temperature to know a mother is nearby or that they’re being held.
Yati
They even suck their thumbs in the womb.
Hiro
But they can’t sense temperature from far away. To know what’s happening at a distance, they rely on sound. And then they cry. Crying is how they communicate, using sound.
Yati
That’s true.
Hiro
They don’t suddenly run a fever to signal something. Shivering a lot and generating heat to say, “I’m hungry,” would use up so much energy. To communicate without expending energy, the answer is sound.
Yati
Our four-year-old still does that, stomping her feet when she’s angry.
Hiro
Right. So fundamentally, information is conveyed through sound. That’s why we recently started an English podcast. Communicating through sound is essential to animals, and we felt we had to do it properly. Text is something you look at without making sound; if you don’t look, there’s no information. But sound can be played continuously. Whether you consciously process it is a separate matter, but information is available.
Yati
Listening to difficult material for a long time is tough, though. Even I end up saying, “Oh, sorry, I wasn’t listening.”
Hiro
That’s a different issue. There’s short-term working memory, and if it’s small, you can’t hold much information, so deep, layered conversations become difficult. Conversation requires a lot of working memory. So it’s good to talk with children a lot so they can train their working memory. There’s a humanities-style interpretation, “creating rich emotional time together,” but from a science perspective, it’s also working-memory training.
Yati
Lately there’s talk about short-video consumption making even young people more forgetful, what some call “digital dementia” or “smartphone brain.”
Hiro
Ultimately, the brain is like a muscle. It’s often thought of as a special organ, closer to internal organs, but it’s more like muscle. If you don’t train it, it weakens. When people age, they stop walking. When they stop walking, their legs and lower back weaken quickly. They get osteoporosis or fall and break bones. You can prevent that, not 100 percent, but largely, if you keep walking. People with a walking habit maintain muscle mass, stay strong in the legs and back, and live healthily. You can fight decline with lifestyle habits. The brain is the same, but these days there are so many traps. Technology keeps developing to minimize how much we have to think. Press a button, and everything’s done for you. That causes the brain to weaken. Once decline reaches a certain point, it becomes dementia.
Yati
There’s even a term now: “smartphone dementia.”
Hiro
But prevention and improvement aren’t complicated. Just adopt a habit of mild training. You don’t need hard hikes or squats to strengthen legs. Just stroll, walk longer distances, do some aerobic exercise. The brain is the same: read aloud, do calculations, that kind of habit. But it has to be effective and convenient. I looked for something simple that I could keep doing long-term, couldn’t find it, so I built an app as a DIY project called BrainDojo. Bit of a plug, I know.
Yati
You really can build a brain-exercise habit in just tens of seconds a day. Maybe brain training is why I, ADHD-leaning as I am, have managed to keep this monthly magazine going. But we got sidetracked. Let’s talk about hearing. How does hearing relate to Practical Life?
Hiro
There’s a Japanese dish called tempura, deep-fried battered seafood and vegetables. Lately I’ve been watching a Japanese cooking anime called Oishinbo with the kids. In one episode, the protagonist and his father compete to pick which chef can fry tempura best, before anyone starts cooking.
Yati
Maybe someone with a big build?
Hiro
The protagonist looked at the chefs’ teeth, nails, and hair, and had them prepare batter, then chose. The father, on the other hand, played a recording of tempura frying sounds and said, “Raise your hand when you hear the sound change.” That’s how he chose.
Yati
Who won?
Hiro
The father. The protagonist checked nails and teeth to see if they were well-trimmed and maintained. Bad habits show up in teeth. If someone smokes, they lose sensitivity to flavor. Hair with styling products dulls the sense of smell. Batter preparation shows skill, whether they chill it properly with ice, for example. You have to do everything right, work carefully, and still be quick. It came down to two chefs, and in the end, the father won by choosing the one who reacted correctly to the sound. The point is that tempura uses all five senses, and sound is critical. If you don’t react to the sound and take the food out immediately, you overfry.
Yati
You do hear sounds when frying, like the rattling when food first goes in. But I thought you judge doneness by color, smell, bubble size, or the feel you get when you tap with a cooking utensil.
Hiro
That’s already too late. Overfried. Amateur. Top-tier chefs at long-established restaurants, the ones you see on YouTube, say it’s all about sound. How well you use your senses determines whether you’re good at cooking or not. Most people rely on visual information, but sometimes sound is the most important.
Yati
We don’t think about it, but just from the sound of water being poured, we can tell whether it’s hot or cold. Sound actually carries a lot of information.
Hiro
Right. A bit on language learning: babies are born able to distinguish sounds not just in their native language but in every language in the world. But between 6 and 12 months, the ability to distinguish foreign sounds drops sharply. In one experiment, nine-month-old infants in English-only homes who interacted directly with Mandarin speakers 12 times over about 5 hours maintained native-level ability to distinguish Mandarin sounds. However, when shown DVDs of the same speakers saying the same things, there was no such effect.
Yati
Researchers argue the key factor wasn’t the live human voice itself, but the presence of live human interaction. The DVDs had studio-quality sound and actually contained more speech samples than the face-to-face sessions. But there’s also evidence in AI that higher audio quality improves recognition accuracy, so we can’t completely rule out that audio quality contains some information babies respond to.
Hiro
True.
Yati
In another experiment, twenty-four to thirty month old toddlers learned new verbs in their native language, comparing “face-to-face interaction,” “Skype interaction,” and “video only.” Video alone didn’t lead to learning. At that stage, the children could already distinguish sounds. They were learning verbs using those sounds, so even lower audio quality should have allowed learning. If someone ran an experiment on whether babies can learn to distinguish foreign sounds via Skype, that might settle the audio-quality-versus-interaction question. The bottom line is that in both infant and toddler cases, simply playing videos doesn’t lead to foreign-language acquisition.
Hiro
Families that succeed with at-home foreign-language learning tend to have siblings rather than only children. You need a real person who will actually speak the foreign language and interact cooperatively with you.
Yati
That’s true. That might be it.
Hiro
Also, Japanese is an especially distant language from English. It’s often said that Japanese speakers have trouble distinguishing the letters L and R. Japanese basically attaches a vowel to every syllable. For example, “class” gets unconsciously pronounced “kurasu” with added vowels. In Japanese transliteration, English words often pick up extra vowels because of these constraints.
Yati
Right. Consonant pronunciation is hard.
Hiro
It’s not only Japanese speakers who struggle with English. French, for example, doesn’t use stress shifts to change meaning the way English does, so French speakers find that difficult, like the word “object,” where stress shifts between noun and verb forms. Japanese has pitch-accent pairs where the same sound can mean different things depending on pitch, like “ame” meaning either rain or candy, so we can grasp the concept. Every speaker gets pulled by the patterns of their native language.
Yati
Huh, I didn’t know that.
Hiro
At the same time, I think it’s important to preserve features unique to your native language. In Japanese, there’s onomatopoeia, like “potsu-potsu” for raindrops falling.
Yati
Actually, onomatopoeia strictly refers to words that imitate actual sounds. Japanese has many words that aren’t like that, bowing “peko-peko,” being “ira-ira” irritated, or going “shiin” silent. In Japan these have been called gitaigo, meaning mimetic words, or gijōgo, meaning emotion-depicting words, but since Western languages rarely have them, they’ve been lumped together with onomatopoeia. Recently, international linguistics has started calling them “ideophones.” Our two-year-old has loved saying “sorori-sorori” while tiptoeing from around age two. That sound doesn’t exist in real life, but the feeling comes through. A fun example.
Hiro
Japanese people have used these expressions for ages. I want to cherish that uniquely Japanese way of perceiving the world.
Yati
And again, authentic sound matters, like adults reading folktales aloud. In my Montessori teacher training course, we learned to talk and sing to babies in the womb. After birth, the mother’s voice becomes a bridge between the world inside and the new world outside, giving the baby security.
Hiro
Voice is important. And it’s good to hear a variety of real sounds, in nature, in the forest, birdsong, insect calls, leaves rustling in the wind. All sorts of sounds. So we want to avoid staying cooped up indoors watching YouTube all the time.
Yati
In the three to six Montessori activities, there’s a game called the Silence Game, where everyone stays still and quiet, listening closely to the sounds around them. It’s fun to try in different places, a park, inside a car. You discover how many sounds there actually are. It calms the mind like meditation. I hope people give it a try.
