Of the five senses, sight is the most untrustworthy and
touch is the most trustworthy. Sight is unreliable as explored through the
podcast Colors by Radiolab. This
podcast begins by exploring how different species view the rainbow. Dogs only
see two colors of the rainbow, while humans see six. Species like butterflies
however see more colors than humans so their rainbows are slightly bigger. Humans
who are colored blind see much less colors than the average human. Additionally,
the podcast explores how some colors were not present at all points in time.
They did this by analyzing works from poet Homer, author of The Odyssey. In his
works the colors black and white came up a significant amount of times, red
only came up occasionally, and green would come up less frequently. However, blue
failed to come up at all. Similar works around the same time period experienced
the same type of pattern. It wasn’t until later works began including more
colors like blue and violet. This proves that color is unreliable because it is
different for every species and every person in different time periods.
Touch seems to be the only reliable sense of the five. As a
child we rely so much on touch to determine the characteristics of things. We
learn that the stove is hot and should not be touched. We learn that things
with sharp edges hurt and should be avoided. We learn that water can be both a
deadly cold and a burning hot. Our instincts originated from touch. Touch
appears to be the same for all species. If I were to shoot you in the leg it
would hurt! The same goes for any other species out there. Unlike sight or
sound it is also very uncommon to find someone who can’t experience the sense
of touch, obviously excluding people who go under anesthetics. People who fail
to hear rely on sight, people who fail to see rely on touch. The sense of touch
is by far the most reliable of the five senses.
I agree with Nathan’s statement. Sight seems to be the least trustworthy. In the podcast Colors by Radiolab they start of speaking about how it all started. Newton questioned colors, so he poked his eye. He did not get far in the results until he got a prism. He shut windows and left one hole for the sun and waited. When the sunlight hit, the prism showed the rainbow. Sight is untrustworthy, because of the different colors humans and animals see. Dogs and the color-blind do not have red sensitive cones, so they only see green, blue, yellow, black, and white. Humans have one extra cone, which is the red sensitive cone. We are able to see the rainbow as ROYGBIV, but dogs/color-blind see GBBB. They also state how butterflies have five cones, so their rainbow would consist of more colors.
ReplyDeleteTouch seems to be the most trustworthy. When we touch items we are able to visualize what we are touching. It will be more credible, because you are physically touching an item that you can identify based on the shape. Those who are color blind rely on touch, like Nathan said. They are able to make their life independent through their cane and touching anything that comes near them to make sure they know where or what they will be going through like stairs.
Hey Nathan (thanks for actually posting something)
ReplyDeleteI would say that I agree with the idea of sight being the most unreliable sense. After the podcast "Colors" I think that it would be safe to say that the only creature with remotely reliable vision would be the mantis shrimp. I also like that you mentioned Homer's "The Odyssey" and how people from older times were color blind to a certain extent.
On the contrary, I would say that my most reliable sense would be hearing. I have training my ears for a while now and I think that my ability to hear is my most dependable sense. That being said, Aaron Copland brings up a good point about how society listens (to music). He thinks that most people don't truly hear the music and focus on losing themselves in the music. Even so, I hold my hearing in high esteem.
Thank you for the post.
ReplyDeleteIn the podcast, “Colors” by Radiolab, hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich discuss the existence of colors in our physical world and how they are created by human minds. The podcast convinces to my belief that ophthalmoception or sight is the least reliable human sense. The role of 5 senses is to communicate with our brains through images, sounds, tastes, smells, and physical contacts. According to the podcast, human sense of sight is limited compared to some animals and our optical abilities are particularly poor. They further proving this point, stating “Certain scientists believe that color has an objective reality, but if the colors humans see are tricks of the imagination, then a perfectly objective view doesn't exist.” I believe sight is the least trustworthy sense since the eyes are bad communicators. They leave most of the interpretation to the brain where the images are generated into something that makes sense based on our preexisted notion and possibly inaccurate.
Aaron Copland’s “How We Listem” explores the “three planes” of listening to music, illustrating the complex capacities of our hearing sense. The essay offers a thorough analysis on how to utilize audioception without falling into error, pushing for intense concentration. However, I personally think hearing sense can also be easily deceived due to the audience’s ongoing pattern of inattention.
Overall, I find tactioception is the most reliable sense. Touch makes us equal. You can develop talented sighting ability, genius hearing, expert palate or smelling sense. However, as for the sense of touch, we are the same, thus, it is more difficult to be fooled. The sense of touch is remarkably complex, and involves the detection of everything from pressure, to soft, to itchiness, to temperature. Being deprived from the feeling of sensation is unimaginable.
I would have disagree with you Nathan, i think that sight is the most trustworthy because our eyes are our world. Have you ever heard that saying would you rather be deaf or blind? I would rather be deaf because sight is so much more important than any other sense. We see colors, textures, shapes everything!! I can't imagine living a dark world where i can't see.
DeleteIn "Colors" by Radiolab, they compare the ways dogs, humans and butterflies see colors. For example, dogs are color blind they only see black and white, whereas humans we see 3 colors and butterflies see 5 or 6 which is way more colors than humans and dogs. However, the thing is they all can still see where is it 100 colors or 2 colors. That is why i believe that sight is the most important sense because without it the other senses aren't possible.
On the other hand, the least important sense is taste because it really is just for our pleasure not for actual use. Like when you taste bland food compared to delicious and savory food. Taste really has no importance to our survival other than for our personal uses.
I agree that sight can be very unreliable, but i would say hearing is also unreliable if not more. Hearing can get easily damaged and it can be very hard to focus your hearing on a specific sound in a loud room. also in the loud room, if you are able to focus on the one sound, you are not able to hear the other sounds consciously. Also, your brain shuts out background sound after awhile. So because of the easy damage and the fact our brain shuts it out often, hearing is not very reliable.
ReplyDeleteI feel smell can be quite reliable. Humans may not have the strongest noses, we use it more that we think. We smell food and either want to eat it, or throw it away because if it smells that bad it must be rotten. When we walk into a room and it smells bad that tells us "hey this room is not clean, we should leave because we don't want to get dirty". Smell picks up things that we can't see, like a rotten apple that looks fine or a dirty room that looks clean.
I agree with your statements Nathan, but I would like to extend your idea to a few new examples. While it’s very true touching the hot plate on a stove and learning that it’s too hot is a good way to validate our sense of touch, feeling in general will be more effective and trustworthy as a sense, because it is the most direct and fastest way for electrical signals to tell our brain what the outside world is like. Sight, which you agreeably regard as more untrustworthy, relies on a system of filtration in the brain from the light that our eye perceives and therefore is not nearly as fast, direct, or simplistic as a feeling of touch. The way electrical signals are interpreted by our brains is very important because the patterns which they appear to our minds are very different between senses, and the best way to trust a sense is to perceive it quickly and physically close, which makes the sense of touch our fondest form of understanding reality around us.
ReplyDeleteOf all the five senses, I believe that sight is the most trustworthy and I believe that hearing is the least trustworthy. I would rather be deaf than be blind; I am more aware of my surroundings with the use of sight. Sight is essential when it comes to our survival and it helps protect us as humans. In the podcast, Colors, they talk about how dogs are colorblind and how they don’t see as many colors as humans do. Sure, dogs may be color blind but they can still see—their vision and sight is still intact. In the podcast, someone says, “Colors we see are tricks of the imagination”, but color is just one of many aspects of sight and there’s so much more that goes into sight than just color. Just because you can’t see in color doesn’t mean that your sight is gone—it’s still there. On the other hand, after reading the essay, How We Listen by Aaron Copland he talks about how we listen and he focuses on the sense of hearing. The author writes, “We all listen to music according to our separate capacities”. This statement exhibits how hearing something varies from person to person. One person may hear something in a totally different manner than the next person; essentially, what one person hears may not be what the next person hears, which shows how untrustworthy hearing can be.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your post in that sight is the most untrustworthy. According to the podcast, "Colors" it seems that sight is the most untrustworthy. Human sight is not nearly as developed as those of certain animals. For example our sense of sight is most definitely not as skilled or complicated as a manta shrimp, who sees colors not even imaginable to humans. Therefore, our sense of sight is limited, perhaps there are colors not even visible to humans.
ReplyDeleteI believe that our sense of hearing is our most accurate sense. In the story from the Norton Reader "How We Listen," Author Copland states our sense of hearing using 3 planes of listening to music, one for our own enjoyment, one to understand the feeling and one to know the musical analysis of the music. "What we do is correlate them- listening in 3 ways at once", I believe our sense to hear is our strongest because we are able to listen to something in so many ways without even realizing we are doing so.
I agree with your opinion about both of the senses. Our sight is specific to the way humans are able to see things, specifically light as mentioned in "Colors." Other animals see things differently because of less or more receptor cones in their eyes. They also brought up people who are color blind. They do not see things the same way as people who are not color blind. This shows us that we do not exactly see things as they are, making our sense of sight the least trustworthy. I do not believe that hearing is our most trustworthy sense because it can be unreliable just like sight. Sometimes, the sounds we hear do not the same to everyone else. We also can imagine sounds that are just figments of the mind. Our sense of smell is also very subjective and specific to every person. I believe that taste is even more unreliable than smell. Things taste very different to people. Because of this, touch is our most trustworthy sense. What we feel does not change, nor is it different for every person. Our minds can imagine different ideas of what the object is but what we feel remains the same.
ReplyDeleteI would have to agree with you Nathan about how our sight can be untrustworthy in a way. Listening to the podcast of Colors by Radiolab gave me a different perceptive of how we can see in a different way than us just hear clearly with our senses. When we do see certain things we always envision what colors emulate the item we are seeing. However, when people don’t have the ability to see exactly what we are seeing, it can be difficult to understand. There is one I somewhat disagree at a point that even though we may see colors differently we still need our sight in that we can still rely on them our ordinary lives. Even though I think our vision is an isn’t as much as an important tool, we still need it in a way that it does connect with our brains that see what our surrounds are and also be aware as well. When it comes to touch as our five senses I can agree that it is our more important factor that we can a better “visual” than our own sight. I do agree with Nathan’s point how when we touch certain things we now notice what is safe or not safe to touch with. Having a sense of touch gives more of an important standpoint of what we really feeling than what we really see in front of us.
ReplyDeleteOut of our five senses I think that our sense of sight is the least trustworthy and our sense of touch is the most trustworthy. In the podcast "colors" we get many examples of why we should not trust our sight. My idea of the color pink could be something totally different to another person. I could say pink is light and another person could say that pink is a bright color. We all see different. Another example that was given was how people who are color blind cannot see the same things that i would see. The same goes for animals. A dog can see less colors than a human can. And a butterfly can see many more colors than a human can. So our untrustworthy sense of sight is not just a human thing. It also differs for differnt animals.
ReplyDeleteI believe that our sense of touch is the most trustworthy. If we all touched a rock we could all agree that the rock is hard and rigid. The same thing with something slimy. We would know that it feels like goo and is probably cold. Our sense of touch is something that we all have in common and we would all be able to explain feeling something the same way