kajarainbow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kajarainbow) wrote2005-06-23 01:30 pm
kajarainbow) wrote2005-06-23 01:30 pm
Entry tags:
Sense-disabilities and senses
I can feel vibrations most people don't. Not can't but don't, I have come to conclude. If someone walks by my room loudly, I can feel it from my perch on my bed. I can feel thumps from the other end of the house (a medium-small house, mind). When I lie in my bed, I'm often keenly aware of little shifts in the bed or whatever the heck it is. This doesn't help me get to sleep, particularly when I'm so easily startled by vibrations.
I've been thinking about why I seem so much more sensitive to this than other people. Let me put this way: the brain has only so much resources. And, okay, let me compare the ability to feel vibrations to hearing.
Feeling and hearing both sense vibrations, which is what sounds are after all.
Feeling can sense only a limited range of vibrations and nearly none that hearing cannot. Hearing can sense most of those and many, many more.
Feeling gives you a limited amount of information about the nature of a sound. Hearing gives more.
When you regularly live in a world of silence, and you don't feel most vibrations, the ones that you do startle you much more since it breaks the "quiet". It makes matters worse that you can only guess so much from how the vibration feels.
In short, the ability to feel vibration gives very little that the sense of hearing does not give better. I think this is why most people don't have that sensitive a sense of vibration. Their brains do not really concentrate on it, since concentrating on hearing instead of devoting focus-resources to both is much more efficient.
...This post really brings out my frustrations with my deafness.
I've been thinking about why I seem so much more sensitive to this than other people. Let me put this way: the brain has only so much resources. And, okay, let me compare the ability to feel vibrations to hearing.
Feeling and hearing both sense vibrations, which is what sounds are after all.
Feeling can sense only a limited range of vibrations and nearly none that hearing cannot. Hearing can sense most of those and many, many more.
Feeling gives you a limited amount of information about the nature of a sound. Hearing gives more.
When you regularly live in a world of silence, and you don't feel most vibrations, the ones that you do startle you much more since it breaks the "quiet". It makes matters worse that you can only guess so much from how the vibration feels.
In short, the ability to feel vibration gives very little that the sense of hearing does not give better. I think this is why most people don't have that sensitive a sense of vibration. Their brains do not really concentrate on it, since concentrating on hearing instead of devoting focus-resources to both is much more efficient.
...This post really brings out my frustrations with my deafness.
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Once I had a bed that would squeak when wiggled at that frequency. Annoying.
And I'm sure it wasn't me wiggling the bed on my own, because I would lay perfectly still and feel the vibrations.
Then, too...when someone's walking somewhere, I will *hear* the vibrations. Guess I've got a lower minimum frequency than some...
Yes, I'm one of those people who notices inane little details but misses the critical and obvious.
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I think you're partly on-target with your explanation of why most hearing people don't notice vibrations as much. Certainly it is easier to focus on one set of input rather than multiple parallel stimuli, especially if all the stimuli are telling the same story about the object that's approaching. But I don't think the reason hearing people chose sound to focus on is necessarily due to its superior usefulness.
Sound is just more culturally salient than feeling, since it's also (for hearing people) the vehicle for language and music. So people are already used to forming associations between a particular sound and a particular meaning, because they already do that for language. If they don't have to learn a new way of forming associations, it's more efficient not to.
Of course, that's just my own hypothesis, not necessarily more right than yours... but as someone who's had to learn to pay attention to sound *and* vibration, it makes more sense to me. *shrug* :c)
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