Vision vs. Hearing: The showdown

“Blinness cuts me off from things; deafness cuts me off from people” -Helen Keller

This quote which Professor Boucher put up in class got me thinking about blindness and deafness. If I had to lose one of those senses today, which would I choose? Would Helen Keller’s words ring true for me? Or would the opposite be the path I would choose if faced with this unimaginable choice? This blog entry is not so much about the science of sight or hearing, but about its effects on my world, in my analysis of the choices, I considered how losing either sense would change my world:

Deafness: there’s no question, deafness would change almost every aspect of my life. Right now I’m sitting in my room, listening to a song that I would never again be able to hear. A shout from a friend across a room, or on the paths would go completely unnoticed. Driving a car would become impossible and illegal. I would never be able to hear a friend’s laugh, or a cry for help. Being plunged into a world of complete silence would be terrible. Beyond the simpler sounds, not being able to hear would make going to class extremely difficult, and i would probably have to leave Vanderbilt for a special school for the deaf. I would not be able to listen to instructions from a teacher, or boss, making normal employment impossible. And all of this is without the mention of the inability to hear fire alarms, the screeching brakes of a car hurtling towards you after it ran a red light, or the “fore!” that a golfer hears when an errant 9-iron is heading at them. I believe that Helen Keller felt that this was the sense that separated her most from the world, because for someone who has never been able to hear or see, this is the sense that would lend the most immediate information about the world. being able to hold a conversation with another person would be able to give her insight into the world that she has never had before. However, I believe that had she grown up with all of her senses intact, and only lost them abruptly, as would be the case with myself or anyone else in the class, she would not find her deafness to be the most dabilitating, or isolating sense to lose.

While I do not in any way mean to suggest the deafness would be easy to deal with, or that I could quickly adjust to it and live a normal life, I think that losing the ability to see would be far worse, far more devastating, and far more isolating to me. I spent the last day paying attention to all of the facial expressions I saw on my friends’ faces, and how much information I gathered from them. The smile that told me my friend thought his randwich was particularly mediocre that day, or the worried look that told me my friend was having a hard time with his statistics homework, and every other thing that I am able to read about people from facial expression or body language, without a word being spoken, are so important in my life, that i think losing the ability to see these things would cut me off from people much more than not being able to hear them. While normal conversations with most people would obviously be extremely difficult to have, sign language and lip reading would be able to make up for a portion of the personal conversations I would have if I were deaf, but not being able to see what a person looked like, or to never read a book, or see a painting again, I think would be much more isolating than not being able to hear a song, or listen to a person talk.

Obviously I have no idea what either sensation would truly be like, and I hopefully will never have to experience either. I think that our upcoming experiment involving earplugs will be very interesting, and will give me a better idea of what living with deafness would be like, but I also believe that it will only reaffirm my feeling that if faced with the decision I would sooner give up my ability to hear than i would give up my ability to see. I believe that Helen Keller felt that hearing was the sense that cut her off from people more than vision, because it is the sense that would provide her with more immediate information about the people she knew, but after careful thought, I believe that for a person who has lived their whole life with both senses intact, like me, the loss of the ability to see would cut us off from the world and the peole in it much more than losing the ability to hear would.

FEBRUARY 13, 2008

Remember that smell…

When we started talking about our sense of smell this week, I began thinking about all of the ways in which smell affects our lives. Smell can protect us from eating rotten food, entering areas with potentially harmful, noxious odors, and alert us to other dangers in our environment (fires, gas leaks, etc..) long before any of our other senses alert us to them. But the aspect of smell that I find the most interesting is the connection between smell and memory.

Almost every memory has an aspect of smell to it. When I think about my dog, or my house, or my parents, or my dorm room, or the golf course that I play when I’m at home, I can almost always associate a smell with them. With the exception of particularly strong smelling things, like my dog or dorm room, the smell might not be a major factor in a memory, it often is something that I have to think specifically about, but it is always there. Smells can also conjure memories unintentionally. How are memory centers in the brain connected so that if I pass a complete stranger who is wearing the same perfume that my mother wears, I have to turn around to make sure that my mom isn’t in Nashville? And why, for that matter, is smell the only sense that can do that? No other sense has the ability to evoke a completely random memory like smell can. The other day I was having dinner with a few of my friends, and the smell of the food suddenly made me think about my grandmother’s funeral, which happened my freshman year of high school.

As we continue to look at the olfactory system, I will be interested to see how the memory centers in the brain are connected, so that a smell, even a faint one, can evoke strong, sometimes long-forgoten memories so quickly.

Feb. 2, 2:32pm