Hearing

By -
Hearing
              If there was something I could not live without is my hearing. I could not imagine watching a movie with only closed caption to guide me through the character’s life, hitting the play button on my favorite Spotify playlist and have nothing but the vibrations to grasp upon, or even being asleep in my bed and not be able to wake up to the artificial bird noises that I have programmed my phone to emit at certain hours of the morning. How could I even understand how life would be without sounds like: the shuffling of cards, a vacuum picking up a bunch of crumbs, and my very favorite. The tone that a GameCube makes when you first turn it on.

              I can honestly say that I admire people that live on without their hearing. There is no way that I could be satisfied with my life deprived of the life’s beautiful miracle of sounds and noises entering my head. The thing the people need to understand about how I perceive hearing is that if I did not have it when I was ten years of age I would not be here writing this blog post. When I was ten years old my family and I went to vacation in south America. My whole family loves traveling so we were all very excited about this trip. First, we went to Chile and that is when, if it wasn’t for my hearing, my life would have been taken away from me. We were hiking through Cerro del Muerto which I now find extremely ironic since the English translation would be “Hill of the Dead.” As we were walking, me and my Brother decided to get of trail. Everything was going fine until I stepped on a kind of animal trap. The trap consisted of a pressure plate that, when pressed and released would ignite a dart gun with tranquilizers strong enough to kill a ten-year-old boy. As soon as I stepped on the plate I heard the strange noise and immediately stopped myself from taking another step. Since I hadn’t moved the gun was not ignited and the tour trail guide was able to safely disarm the trap and save my life. So, I say this again. To me, hearing has been a life saver.

Comments

  1. ShawnMay 3, 2018 at 7:05 AM

    Wow! What a crazy story! I've never heard of a tranquilizer trap before, do you know what they were trying to catch?

    I'm going to approach my personal experience this from the other side -- as someone who used their sense of hearing the LEAST during most of their childhood.

    All the way through High School I never listened to music, rarely appreciated the sounds around me, and on the odd day I sometimes listened to other people. I had an ability to tune things out at will. Taking sounds and muffling them to background noise. I think it's because as a kid I lived right next to an airport and Boeing's construction site that I learned very quickly how to tune out noises.

    The Sound of Silence

    When you tune out sound, and all you have is silence -- I feel like a lot of people go to inner personal thoughts. You self reflect, think upon goals, stresses, and honestly analyze how you are. I spent a lot of time in my own head. When you talk to yourself, are you hearing actually hearing sound? Sure, your ears is a receptor in sound waves, but it's your brain that does that actual analyzing of the sounds. Are the sounds conjured in ones mind really that different than the sound-wave receptors being read by your brain? I can hear myself talk in my head and I can hear birds chirping if I imagine them or a firework going off. Are the sounds of memories not actual sounds?

    Just some questions that your blog post brought up for me!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jonathan Brumberg-KrausMay 4, 2018 at 9:13 AM

    Wow, to both your posts.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The most primitive sense

By -
Image
Smell the Flowers by Kirsten Star Smell, to me, is the most primitive sense. When most mammals are born, they immediately can recognize their mother’s smell and form an attachment to that smell. Mammals like puppies are almost entirely limited to only the sense of smell until they develop more of their other senses. The sense of smell also becomes the most primitive when considering humans and the phenomenon of perfume. For years, humans hunted certain animals for the purpose of obtaining the musk produced in the anal gland. This musk in small doses can act as an aphrodisiac when put into a perfume even though it has incredibly primitive origins. Though most of Western culture has an aversion to smells considered gross or undesirable, the wealthiest of women are still willing to pay heavy prices to spray a smell once obtained from the anal glands of other animals. The sense of smell is not something that humans can control and adjust but rather it is only changed by evolution over
Read more

Cannibalism and Symbolism

By -
Symbolism plays an important role in religious ceremonies because people cannot have the divine being where they want him all the time. So they start creating ways to be in touch with God. Such as in Christianity, eating bread is symbolized to be eating God-made flesh. There are similar rituals in Judaism where they eat the food of God. A big difference between taste and the other senses is that the object that is being sensed is internalized, whereas all the other senses use an external sensation. Taste cannot extend anywhere like the other senses can. This allows the humans to have no barrier between the divine (symbolized as food) and themselves. This is the closest they can get to God, but internalizing Him.  This thought of getting the closest they can to someone by ingesting and gaining power from it led my mind to wander to the thought of serial killers that also happen to be cannibals. I know that it might be a stretch, but there are some similarities. I als
Read more

Wrap-Up Post

By -
Image
Alright, let’s tie this up in a nice little bow. I genuinely did not know what to expect coming into this class. The extent of my knowledge of the senses comes from elementary school when we had to make it a little song to get the information through our tiny heads. Beyond that, everything seemed pretty cut and dry. We have five senses. We need to use all of them to survive. It’s as simple as that. I did not know how there was enough to talk about the senses to fill an entire college course, especially one specifically regarding the relationship between the senses and religion. But the fact that we were barely able to fit all the content in before the semester ended proves just how wrong I was. Let’s talk about why that is and what some of the things I learned were. First off, even the most basic assumption about the senses, that there are five of them, was questioned immediately. The sixth sense may not have been as clearly defined as the other senses, but there was certainly a lot to
Read more