I am watching the cars pass by, and I hear the sound, and I (now) understand how it relates to the car's movement. I hear a person talking, see the movement of the lips, and I perceive the connection. It seems at possible to learn lipreading, that is, understanding speech by visually interpreting the movements of the lips, face, and tongue. Before I had always noticed, how unrelated those movements were to the words actually uttered. This became not exactly so after my work with a speech therapist to improve my English pronunciation, and I think that after that I learned to connect the sound of English and the look of an English-speaking person much better. Hence, I could improve my English pronunciation, because I would sometimes habitually hear some English sound in a Russian way, yet the facial expression of the speaker would tell me I was wrong, inhibiting my habitual way of language perception.
However, right now it strikes me, how stronger is my connection of the look of a speaking person with the sound. I see a group of people walking in the street, and I hear the sound of their steps, particularly as they walk on different surfaces. I notice that I had hardly ever made such connections. I turn away and still hear their steps, and their steps stand out from the overall sound background. The sounds of cars start to stand out too, and as I keep watching them, I start to sense how the sounds of cars tell me more about their direction, the distance to them. I see a woman walk in high heels, I hear the sound, and I start to hear this sound and to discern it from the rest. As I keep walking down the street, the world of sounds transforms, and now I understand much more, which sound means what. Why does it happen only now, even though hearing had probably been the most acute of my senses for my whole life?
I have always categorized myself as a person with predominantly audial perception of the world, as opposed to visual or kinesthetic. This included sensitivity to noise as well as sensitivity to beautiful music. However artificial is the distinction between different learning styles, I have always been able to listen to an explanation of something complicated and understand the meaning, and memorize what I was told, sometimes memorizing some sentences exactly as they were. (However, I have always been able to read very quickly - I never tried to fix the gaze, but instead scanned the page almost diagonally, taking in groups of several words each and converting those groups directly into meaning. When I was about 8, we has to read a read aloud test with reading a passage aloud and trying to get as many words as possible in a given segment of time. I did very well.)
Why is it that I did not allow my sense of sound to tell me about things around me, about the geometry of the space around me, about the movement of people and objects around me? I suspect that the sense of vision is, in some sense, primary to other senses, and as we are learning about the world and creating new concepts, we tend to ground those concepts in vision. Therefore, when other senses contradict the vision, the vision dominates, however, misleading or imperfect. If my explanation it correct, it should support the empirical findings of Peter Grunwald, the creator of the Eyebody method, that harmonizing the visual system often has profound impact on all aspects on a person's being: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Seeing is believing, and if we don't see well or correctly, we don't believe. Even if all other senses could come together and provide a coherent picture, perhaps even more useful than the one that we see, this will not happen as long as the person can see anything at all.
Vision often defines our whole way of thinking, if not our whole way of being. I remember when I was first reading the mentioned Quine's "Word and object", I found it interesting, if not peculiar, that according to him, the world consisted of objects: desks, apples, umbrellas, even people. It had never occurred to me prior to that to divide the world into objects. However, after I first gained stereopsis, on that night when I was playing with a ball, it immediately became clear to me that, indeed, the world consisted of objects. Those objects were very well separated in space, their boundaries were well-defined, and the object that I was looking at was highlighted. The brain or the mind, it seems, really likes to create those sensory unities such as a desk, an apple, so we can do something with them - use, eat, talk to. Vision is most suitable for dividing everything into objects. When my vision was not dividing things into objects, my sense of hearing was not dividing the totality of perceived sounds into sounds coming from various causes or objects. I guess, this may also be a good thing...
However, right now it strikes me, how stronger is my connection of the look of a speaking person with the sound. I see a group of people walking in the street, and I hear the sound of their steps, particularly as they walk on different surfaces. I notice that I had hardly ever made such connections. I turn away and still hear their steps, and their steps stand out from the overall sound background. The sounds of cars start to stand out too, and as I keep watching them, I start to sense how the sounds of cars tell me more about their direction, the distance to them. I see a woman walk in high heels, I hear the sound, and I start to hear this sound and to discern it from the rest. As I keep walking down the street, the world of sounds transforms, and now I understand much more, which sound means what. Why does it happen only now, even though hearing had probably been the most acute of my senses for my whole life?
I have always categorized myself as a person with predominantly audial perception of the world, as opposed to visual or kinesthetic. This included sensitivity to noise as well as sensitivity to beautiful music. However artificial is the distinction between different learning styles, I have always been able to listen to an explanation of something complicated and understand the meaning, and memorize what I was told, sometimes memorizing some sentences exactly as they were. (However, I have always been able to read very quickly - I never tried to fix the gaze, but instead scanned the page almost diagonally, taking in groups of several words each and converting those groups directly into meaning. When I was about 8, we has to read a read aloud test with reading a passage aloud and trying to get as many words as possible in a given segment of time. I did very well.)
Why is it that I did not allow my sense of sound to tell me about things around me, about the geometry of the space around me, about the movement of people and objects around me? I suspect that the sense of vision is, in some sense, primary to other senses, and as we are learning about the world and creating new concepts, we tend to ground those concepts in vision. Therefore, when other senses contradict the vision, the vision dominates, however, misleading or imperfect. If my explanation it correct, it should support the empirical findings of Peter Grunwald, the creator of the Eyebody method, that harmonizing the visual system often has profound impact on all aspects on a person's being: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Seeing is believing, and if we don't see well or correctly, we don't believe. Even if all other senses could come together and provide a coherent picture, perhaps even more useful than the one that we see, this will not happen as long as the person can see anything at all.
Vision often defines our whole way of thinking, if not our whole way of being. I remember when I was first reading the mentioned Quine's "Word and object", I found it interesting, if not peculiar, that according to him, the world consisted of objects: desks, apples, umbrellas, even people. It had never occurred to me prior to that to divide the world into objects. However, after I first gained stereopsis, on that night when I was playing with a ball, it immediately became clear to me that, indeed, the world consisted of objects. Those objects were very well separated in space, their boundaries were well-defined, and the object that I was looking at was highlighted. The brain or the mind, it seems, really likes to create those sensory unities such as a desk, an apple, so we can do something with them - use, eat, talk to. Vision is most suitable for dividing everything into objects. When my vision was not dividing things into objects, my sense of hearing was not dividing the totality of perceived sounds into sounds coming from various causes or objects. I guess, this may also be a good thing...
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