We all have our different ways. Either of viewing things, listening,
or even tasting things. Our 5 senses altogether help us comprehend the world and
communicate with it effectively. Out of the 5, the least trustworthy one is
sight. It is sight because although everything we see may be true to us, it isn’t
true to everybody else around us. It is important because in this we are
original, but you and I may not view things in the same manner. In the podcast,
“Colors”, it is said that we our colors are “tricks of imagination” similarly
meaning that what we might see can only exist in our minds therefore our sight
is untrustworthy. The most trustworthy sense that we have can be touch. The other
3 senses: taste, smell, and hearing are not as trustworthy because we have our
own perception of each. Taste can be different for everyone, we can both taste
something and have different opinions of it. In smell, it is noticeable when we
smell something burning or we recognize the smell of dog when we enter somebody’s
home or the smell of cigarette when we ride in somebody’s car. But there are
times when some specific smells remind us of different situations we were in or
they remind of somebody and consequently we perceive the specific smell in a
different way. Hearing is something that we can sometimes agree on but a good
example when we don’t is mentioned in the short essay of “How We Listen”. Aaron
Copland informs us that we do not always agree on the theme of a song or what
its purpose is, therefore we have our own perception of music. Our opinions go
based off on what we have previously listened to. Another example can be when
we misinterpret things, we take things in the wrong context because we thought
we heard something else. Touch is important because it is something we tend to
do ever since we were babies, as the years went on we learned what we shouldn’t
grab something that isn’t ours or we how we should pick up after ourselves. Touch
is something that had to be learned either by experience or by somebody telling
us but it has naturally been inside us since the beginning.
I would have to agree with you and say that sight is the least effective and most unreliable of the five senses because as a whole altogether, everyone sees the same singular object in many different ways. I can see and perceive one thing one way and another person can take it the whole other way which just depends on how our brains utilizes the things we see to comprehend them. As Aaron Copland says in How We Listen, “You will be able, in other words, in your own mind, to draw a frame of emotional feeling around your theme (NR 1041).” He is saying that no matter what you see, your brain will perceive it differently then any other person would. Again, I agree with you when you say that touch is the most effective and most trustworthy because everything you touch is the same item to everyone which helps people learn life lessons. For example, the sense of touch helps you as a child learn the importance of life, like you talked about the example in class with the kid touching the hot stove and now the always checks to make sure if it’s hot or not where you can get hurt.
ReplyDeleteOf my five senses I would say that sight is the least trustworthy and my hearing is the most trustworthy. The eyes are probably adjust more to your surroundings than any other part of your body. Take the show Brain Games for example; they do lots of experiments that prove that our eyes basically see what we want them to, and usually not what’s actually there. Sight is also discussed in the podcast Colors. The hosts talk about how people and animals don’t see colors the same way - we (humans) don’t even see colors the same way amongst ourselves. This tells me that none of what we see can actually be taken as the truth. If we all see things differently, we won’t be able to determine what is actually there.
ReplyDeleteI say hearing is my most trustworthy because I train my ears every single day. Being a musician, my hearing is definitely one of my most valuable and necessary tools. I have a class called Aural Skills and I’ll have at least four required semesters of it - that’s how serious it is. Since I picked up an instrument, my ears have been steadily training and coming to college has only intensified that. In Aaron Copland’s (he’s a very influential composer by the way) essay, he actually brings up some of the ways we are trained to listen versus some of the ways that others listen to music. This shows that people’s hearing could be almost as varied as our eyesight, but that training allows for hearing to become a very strong sense.
I agree with you on our sight being untrustworthy. I believe our eyes don't see everything fairly, everyone's perception of what they see are different so how do we know what to trust? Sight is probably the easiest sense to manipulate. Remember the dress that broke social media with the question "Is it blue or white?", still to this day we still argue about the color. I would go with touch as being the most trustworthy because it's pretty straightforward and not as easy to exploit like sight.
ReplyDeleteIt’s true what you say, it also calls my attention the most is that no one’s five senses can be of the same functional quality as someone else’s. That makes it hard to determine which of the senses are the most and least trustworthy. In my opinion, I do agree that it is sight that is the most untrustworthy. Colors being ‘tricks of our imagination’ as said in the Radiolab podcast, makes sense, we really are only able to see what we’ve already experienced. I do believe that our color spectrum is limited to what we’ve been exposed to; there’s so much more out there than what we’re able to see. But even if we were to see more colors, we wouldn’t be able to appreciate what we can see. The rainbow would lose the value some humans have attached to it, if any. Now for the most trustworthy I would also have to agree with the feeling of touch. Of all the senses, I think this would have to be the most trustworthy. It seems like the most black-or-white sense. One without loopholes. There’s no escaping how to experience your sense of touch. One might try to fight that numbness would be a loophole, but I think of that more as a temporary defect. Of course one is not going to entrust in their sense when it isn’t at 100%.
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