kajarainbow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kajarainbow) wrote2004-09-18 08:35 pm
kajarainbow) wrote2004-09-18 08:35 pm
Entry tags:
Basics about a deaf person's perceptions
A lot of people've been curious about my deafness. To them, I live in an alien world, one just as alien as theirs feels to me. I've thought about doing this post for a long time, but I'm only setting fingers to keyboard about this just now. But, first off, before you begin reading, I've already heard "I'm sorry that you're deaf" and variations therefore such countless times that it just loses all sympathy effect (if it had any) in its banal repetition. Sorry about that.
First off, this is entirely about my own experiences as opposed to general deafness experiences. Secondly, my deafness is very profound. So profound I'm at about the bottom range of deafness, so profound that hearing aids are absolutely useless to me, far more so than they are to most deaf people. And, I've been this way since the age of one. I was speaking, I had a knowledge of what sound was like, and then I lost it all in my sickness. I have no memory of sound.
What really hits me the most, what solely bothers me the most, is the communication barrier. I can't talk to people except by signing, by written English, and by general rough gesturing. I can do a lot to achieve basic needs with those, but my experiences with people who don't sign, in the flesh, is mostly just based on basic need-meeting. I write slowly, slowly enough that dialogues by paper-and-pen tend to get far less said, compared to signing with another person or typing back and forth over the Internet.
I don't lipread. I took years of speech courses, and I can't lipread. I can't speak more than a very few words. I can't even say even one variation each of all the letters in the alphabet, let alone all the various complex vowels and consonants. I seem to have a learning disability for correlating the movements of lips to meaning, and it sucks.
My experience of the world is primarily confined to the funnel my vision forms, with supplementary input by vibration and scent, as well as touch and, in those occasions when I want to use it, taste. I can actually tell a lot by vibration, but far less than people can tell by sound. Many, countless sounds don't make vibrations significant to feel (I can only feel cars while inside them, though I can easily feel motorcyles and trains from some distance). Nevertheless, vibration is a significant sense for me, and one that seems to be more startling for me than sounds are for people who can hear them. They are more distracting to me than the originating sounds seem to be to other people.
I seem to notice scents a bit more often than hearing people do, though it's not actually more acute. I don't think I can smell things most hearing people can't, it seems like I'm simply less prone to ignoring smells. And, scents are fleeting enough that it's not a primary sense for me.
Vision is critical to me, as you can easily imagine. If it isn't in front of myeyes, I'm not very aware of it. I dislike first-person computer games because of this, because I find the loss of awareness over third-person hard to deal with. Generally, the only way I can tell something's location other than seeing it is by touching it. I have to look very carefully when crossing streets to avoid sensing cars by touch instead of sight. Once, I looked both ways so carefully that I neglected to look ahead and got backed into (fortunately slowly) by a van leaving the driveway I was walking right into.
Now to how I conceptualize things I don't sense. My images of sounds and music are weird, part what vibrations I can pick up with my sense of touch, partly assorted metaphors I pick up in my copious reading, and partly peculiar alien sensations that are half mood, that don't seem to correspond with any conventional sense or emotion. When I see a sound described or just named, I often associate visuals and mood with it, like for example, one of my friends' descriptions of industry music as 'like an angry factory'.
I intake enough metaphors of sounds in pure words that I can pretend at it, that I can actually pull off heavily musical characters convincingly. In short, I can bullshit it well enough. For many people the simple associations seem to be enough to create the sounds for them.
My images of sounds aren't necessarily anything close to what they are like. My images are born out of a need to grasp things, to give them some degree of meaning. Just today, a friend told me cawing sounds like more coarse chirruping. I didn't know that, I still have to assimilate the readjustment of my conceptualization of cawing. Also, apparently catbirds sound like 'crows on helium', and they sound like cats meowing (feelable by putting my throats on older cats), which is 'Strained, metallic, electric, like a wire being stroked with razor blades.'. A lot of things that I didn't know, that I still have to assimilate, which I only half understand.
Related is how I experience language, but that's a complex enough subject itself in itself that I'm leaving it for another entry dedicated just to it--it includes issues such as how I deal with spelling non-phonetically, what I think and drea in, and so on.
I'll also probably devote a more brief post to the devices I use to help cope with a hearing world (things like specialized alarms, so on).
Feel free to ask any question not already answered in this post. I'll probably compile another post later on including those questions and their answers.
First off, this is entirely about my own experiences as opposed to general deafness experiences. Secondly, my deafness is very profound. So profound I'm at about the bottom range of deafness, so profound that hearing aids are absolutely useless to me, far more so than they are to most deaf people. And, I've been this way since the age of one. I was speaking, I had a knowledge of what sound was like, and then I lost it all in my sickness. I have no memory of sound.
What really hits me the most, what solely bothers me the most, is the communication barrier. I can't talk to people except by signing, by written English, and by general rough gesturing. I can do a lot to achieve basic needs with those, but my experiences with people who don't sign, in the flesh, is mostly just based on basic need-meeting. I write slowly, slowly enough that dialogues by paper-and-pen tend to get far less said, compared to signing with another person or typing back and forth over the Internet.
I don't lipread. I took years of speech courses, and I can't lipread. I can't speak more than a very few words. I can't even say even one variation each of all the letters in the alphabet, let alone all the various complex vowels and consonants. I seem to have a learning disability for correlating the movements of lips to meaning, and it sucks.
My experience of the world is primarily confined to the funnel my vision forms, with supplementary input by vibration and scent, as well as touch and, in those occasions when I want to use it, taste. I can actually tell a lot by vibration, but far less than people can tell by sound. Many, countless sounds don't make vibrations significant to feel (I can only feel cars while inside them, though I can easily feel motorcyles and trains from some distance). Nevertheless, vibration is a significant sense for me, and one that seems to be more startling for me than sounds are for people who can hear them. They are more distracting to me than the originating sounds seem to be to other people.
I seem to notice scents a bit more often than hearing people do, though it's not actually more acute. I don't think I can smell things most hearing people can't, it seems like I'm simply less prone to ignoring smells. And, scents are fleeting enough that it's not a primary sense for me.
Vision is critical to me, as you can easily imagine. If it isn't in front of myeyes, I'm not very aware of it. I dislike first-person computer games because of this, because I find the loss of awareness over third-person hard to deal with. Generally, the only way I can tell something's location other than seeing it is by touching it. I have to look very carefully when crossing streets to avoid sensing cars by touch instead of sight. Once, I looked both ways so carefully that I neglected to look ahead and got backed into (fortunately slowly) by a van leaving the driveway I was walking right into.
Now to how I conceptualize things I don't sense. My images of sounds and music are weird, part what vibrations I can pick up with my sense of touch, partly assorted metaphors I pick up in my copious reading, and partly peculiar alien sensations that are half mood, that don't seem to correspond with any conventional sense or emotion. When I see a sound described or just named, I often associate visuals and mood with it, like for example, one of my friends' descriptions of industry music as 'like an angry factory'.
I intake enough metaphors of sounds in pure words that I can pretend at it, that I can actually pull off heavily musical characters convincingly. In short, I can bullshit it well enough. For many people the simple associations seem to be enough to create the sounds for them.
My images of sounds aren't necessarily anything close to what they are like. My images are born out of a need to grasp things, to give them some degree of meaning. Just today, a friend told me cawing sounds like more coarse chirruping. I didn't know that, I still have to assimilate the readjustment of my conceptualization of cawing. Also, apparently catbirds sound like 'crows on helium', and they sound like cats meowing (feelable by putting my throats on older cats), which is 'Strained, metallic, electric, like a wire being stroked with razor blades.'. A lot of things that I didn't know, that I still have to assimilate, which I only half understand.
Related is how I experience language, but that's a complex enough subject itself in itself that I'm leaving it for another entry dedicated just to it--it includes issues such as how I deal with spelling non-phonetically, what I think and drea in, and so on.
I'll also probably devote a more brief post to the devices I use to help cope with a hearing world (things like specialized alarms, so on).
Feel free to ask any question not already answered in this post. I'll probably compile another post later on including those questions and their answers.
no subject
Do you have any sort of sense of a mental "voice" for people - some imagined cadence of the typed words being read, of the way they might move while speaking - all the non-aural components that're an important part of how one person speaks as distinct from another?
(Admittedly, this is more difficult in contexts like Puzzlebox where all language is very considered - I deliberately try to evoke different deliveries for some characters. Still, consider , say, my LJ/IM/etc versus someone else's...)
no subject
Hmm. Let's see. This really is a topic that falls within the territory of the language post, but I'll answer it anyway, just so I can crib it later for that post. Hee. Okay, actually, this is part of the 'language is frelling complex for me' thing. It's more like a gestalt *including the textual styling*, so that it's hard for me to sort out when someone's evolved their own 'voice'. But, yes, I do sometimes imagine body language, facial expressions, but that isn't automatically evoked. It tends to happen the most with particularly emotional text.
Nevertheless, I do have sort of an image like that of you. And different images of Twin, okyno, etc.