After listening to the podcast “Colors,” and reading, “How We Listen,” I have come to the conclusion that on some level, all of our senses are subjective. All of one’s senses are detected using the human brain, and while we may all have the same ability to pick up on these senses, it is how we interpret our senses that usually differ person to person. With that being said, I think that one’s sense of touch is their most reliable trait, while the rest of one’s senses are nearly evenly less reliable, with one’s sense of hearing being the least so.
The reason one’s sense of touch should be considered as the most reliable is because it is the least subjective. If a group of people were to touch a surface that, by scientific standards, would be undeniably rough, it would likely feel rough to most, if not everybody. The sense of touch requires the least amount of critical thought by the brain, and is the least likely to be tampered with. Some specific cases, like paralysis or arthritis, can hinder one’s sense of touch, however, they still don’t make the sense of touch any more subjective or unreliable.
On the other hand, one’s senses of listening and sight, for example, are quite unreliable. The author of “How We Listen” even went so far as to say that many aren’t conscious of an entire plane of listening when hearing music. He describes this plane as the “Musical Plane”— a plane in which we listen to music purely for the components of the music itself, like the harmony, rhythm, melody, etc. He also said, however, that people that are trained to listen to music in this way often rely on this plane of listening too much. There is a very fine line when it comes to how much or how little we should be tuned into this plane of listening, let alone the other two planes the author describes in unison. The author himself even doesn’t seem 100% sure how to describe a perfect sense of listening to his audience, purely because of its subjectivity. Similarly, in “Colors,” it is nearly immediately stated that there is no objective color. Color is interpreted different to everybody. It was even stated that 1 in every 10 males have some form of color blindness. So, with all of this being said, color may be interpreted very differently and more vividly by, say, an artist, rather than a musician; a song may also be interpreted more vividly by a musician rather than said artist. It is very difficult to tell. This is why to me, these two senses are very unreliable when it comes to objectivity.
After reading Aaron Copland’s “How We Listen” and listening to Radiolab’s podcast “Colors”, I’ve come to realize the most untrustworthy sense my body has is sight. I believe it to be untrustworthy because of the many varieties there are in the eyesight of humans and animals. It’s crazy to think that not everything I see is what an animal might see, and that maybe someone else see less than I do. If that’s the case, then how can I be sure what I see is the actual thing? Our minds are easily tricked into seeing things that aren’t there all the time. I’ve seen the ways our mind is tricked through a simple 2D moving picture making it look 3D. Or the way you position a certain thing can make it look bigger or smaller than it really is. The strange way our eyesight works makes me feel I can no longer say, “I’ll believe it until I see it.” How can I trust my eyesight if it varies within species?
ReplyDeleteI believe that the most trustworthy sense would have to be sound and the least trustworthy would have to be sight. Sound because when we don’t even know the name for something we can still recognize it as a sound. It’s not something we don’t register just because we don’t have a name for it. We can pull emotion from practically any sound, whether it is just some sounds put together to make words or a beautiful note made on a piano to finish a wonderful piece of music. The least trustworthy would be sight. In the podcast, they mentioned a group of people in the jungle that had no word for the color blue, and when shown the color blue, next to the color green, they could not tell the difference between the two colors, just because they didn’t have a name for it. Why should we trust our sight when our brain can gloss over something because we don’t have a name for it? We would be naive to think that we have discovered everything we can see. We might be missing colors or organisms or something along those lines because our brain chooses not to recognize it as something important because it doesn’t have a name.
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