The Eyes and the Ears
The world in which we live has beautiful scenes, beautiful landscapes, beautiful colors. They are pleasant to see, it is delightful to look at these things.
Nevertheless, I always told my students that the ears are more important for our everyday life than the eyes. Many of them did not believe me. My ophthalmologist friends do not believe me. There is no question that these are our two most important sense organs. But let us examine this problem in more detail.
Mankind has something very important called Language. It allows us to communicate. It is something that we acquire with our ears. Congenital deafness makes it very difficult to acquire a language, we need a special education to obtain it. And acquiring a language is so important that most of the acquisition happens between the ages of two months and two years – an age we do not remember. But we do remember going to school and learning to read. To acquire a language is much more difficult for the Central Nervous System than to learn to read and write, we are only learning to use symbols to represent the language that we have already acquired.
On the other hand, after we learn to read, a significant amount of information – in fact, a major portion of our education – is obtained through the eyes.
When we focus on blindness the major problems are locomotion and task performance, which require special training. There is no difference between congenital or acquired blindness. The major problem with deafness is lack of communication and its consequent isolation, the inability to share communication with other persons. I am sure that all of you have seen elderly persons in a family reunion, sitting quietly in the corner of a room, totally unable to understand the people who are all talking at the same time. And deafness brings a significant reduction in communication, which becomes a bare minimum. Nobody shouts a joke, nobody shouts gossips.
We owe to Helen Keller, who was deaf and blind, an interesting insight about seeing and hearing. “Blindness,” she said, “takes us apart from things; deafness takes us apart from people.”
Marshall McLuhan expressed his opinion that the growing importance of vision in our lives was a consequence of the invention of the phonetic alphabet. “The dominant sense organ for social orientation in pre-alphabet societies was the ear: hearing is believing. The phonetic alphabet substituted the neutral world of the eyes for the magical world of the ears.”
And he added: “The ears do not favor a particular ‘point of view.’ We live in an envelope of sounds that constitutes a continuous net around us. We say that ‘the music fills the space,’ we do not say ‘the music fills a certain segment of space’.”
Yet the eyes see only fixed images. The continuity in our vision is just a succeeding series of these fixed images, causing an impression of movement. It is just like a movie picture, we see one frame at a time. Sound, however, is never static, it is always continuous.
In fact, the eyes became important for reading, more than to see beautiful colors and images. It is amazing the way we integrate two totally different sense organs for different correlated functions, such as hearing, speaking, reading and writing.
So I still feel that profound hearing loss is the most severely incapacitating of all human diseases.
The most important thing is that now we can fight profound deafness with cochlear implants. We are seeing more and more children with congenital deafness being implanted and going to ordinary schools. We are seeing people who have become deaf learn to hear again, being given electric currents instead of sounds.
I know that ophthalmologists are dedicating a lot of effort to develop an eye implant. I hope they succeed. And then we will be able to treat deafness and blindness.
 |
| Colors |
Mankind has something very important called Language. It allows us to communicate. It is something that we acquire with our ears. Congenital deafness makes it very difficult to acquire a language, we need a special education to obtain it. And acquiring a language is so important that most of the acquisition happens between the ages of two months and two years – an age we do not remember. But we do remember going to school and learning to read. To acquire a language is much more difficult for the Central Nervous System than to learn to read and write, we are only learning to use symbols to represent the language that we have already acquired.
On the other hand, after we learn to read, a significant amount of information – in fact, a major portion of our education – is obtained through the eyes.
When we focus on blindness the major problems are locomotion and task performance, which require special training. There is no difference between congenital or acquired blindness. The major problem with deafness is lack of communication and its consequent isolation, the inability to share communication with other persons. I am sure that all of you have seen elderly persons in a family reunion, sitting quietly in the corner of a room, totally unable to understand the people who are all talking at the same time. And deafness brings a significant reduction in communication, which becomes a bare minimum. Nobody shouts a joke, nobody shouts gossips.
We owe to Helen Keller, who was deaf and blind, an interesting insight about seeing and hearing. “Blindness,” she said, “takes us apart from things; deafness takes us apart from people.”
Marshall McLuhan expressed his opinion that the growing importance of vision in our lives was a consequence of the invention of the phonetic alphabet. “The dominant sense organ for social orientation in pre-alphabet societies was the ear: hearing is believing. The phonetic alphabet substituted the neutral world of the eyes for the magical world of the ears.”
And he added: “The ears do not favor a particular ‘point of view.’ We live in an envelope of sounds that constitutes a continuous net around us. We say that ‘the music fills the space,’ we do not say ‘the music fills a certain segment of space’.”
Yet the eyes see only fixed images. The continuity in our vision is just a succeeding series of these fixed images, causing an impression of movement. It is just like a movie picture, we see one frame at a time. Sound, however, is never static, it is always continuous.
In fact, the eyes became important for reading, more than to see beautiful colors and images. It is amazing the way we integrate two totally different sense organs for different correlated functions, such as hearing, speaking, reading and writing.
 |
| A book that I wrote - dedicated to people with hearing disorders |
So I still feel that profound hearing loss is the most severely incapacitating of all human diseases.
The most important thing is that now we can fight profound deafness with cochlear implants. We are seeing more and more children with congenital deafness being implanted and going to ordinary schools. We are seeing people who have become deaf learn to hear again, being given electric currents instead of sounds.
I know that ophthalmologists are dedicating a lot of effort to develop an eye implant. I hope they succeed. And then we will be able to treat deafness and blindness.
Comments
Post a Comment