Tuesday, November 29, 2016
Most and Least Trustworthy
In the radio lab "Colors" and the short essay "How We Listen" by Aaron Copland I think the most trustworthy out of our five senses would be our sight and our least trustworthy would be our hearing. In reading "Colors" Copland talks about how when we listen to music there are three separate planes to which each person may or may not listen on. He lists these planes as the sensuous plane, the expressive plane, and the sheerly musical plane. He later goes on to talk about how when some people listen to music they aren't really listening because when they listen to the music their mind takes them to a place where it is easier to dream. Not many notice this because they think that by listening to the music they are able to be expressive which they aren't really doing because they aren't listening to the music. In truth are tuning out the music that is tuning out the world around them. We can listen to different and each of us get different feelings from the music. When I listened to Bach's Well Tempered Clavichord I could tell when the tune of the notes that were played each changed to a different feeling from sad to happy or from calm to erratic. When I asked my room mate to listen to the same piece I had listened to to her the music was just the same note the whole time she could not determine when the piece changed its tune. Our hearing is the least trustworthy of our senses because out of all the things we hear we don't all hear the same things as someone else. To someone else a song may give them a different feeling or represent something else that someone else would think was wrong. In the radio lab "Colors" they talked about colors with different people and how they each did different tests and how colors to them either had a lot or a little bit of colors. When they talked about the color they got from the sap of the tree and how when they added water to it the color would then be noticed. Behind the making of the sap though they found out that a bullet had been found in the sap that they had used. When they talked about how some women were known to be tetracolor that they may be able to see more colors than most people. When they were with the mother that was an interior designer and was able to see the little difference in the shades of cloth. She described the sky as blue but having hints of pink in it. Our sight is most trustworthy to me because we can see so many different shades of colors to some a rainbow may only have six colors but to other people it may consist of up to sixteen colors like the mantis shrimp can see. Our sight tells us when there is a change in something whether it be in weather or a change in color. So to recap our hearing is the least trustworthy because we don't always listen when we hear music or speak to person. Our sight is the most trustworthy because even without being able to see all colors we still notice the different tints and shades in our lives.
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In the Colors podcast and in How We Listen, they both talk about the different senses in humans and how some of our senses are more reliable than others. I personally believe that our sight is the least reliable of our senses and the way we see colors is a prime example of that. In the podcast they talk about how the light of the sun was once thought to be just a white light but an expirement done by Isaac Newton later disproved this misconception. Our biology actually strongly influences the way we see light which as Newtons experiment shows our sight is not very reliable. Our hearing is the most reliable of our senses although it has its faults. In How We Listen the author talks about how feel people who listen to music actually truly listen to it and comprehend it. For the people who can comprehend it they are able to use their hearing to connect with music on a deeper personal level and you can't see music you can only hear it. This shows how hearing I'd the strongest of our senses because we connect with things like music through our hearing.
ReplyDeleteThe Radiolab podcast 'Colors" and the passage from the Norton Reader " How we listen" both lay emphasis on how we have different perspectives of what constitutes life itself. This is mostly influenced by our five senses. The podcast about colors provides us with an insight of how capable the eyes of every living thing are to stare at the same thing but see different things due to the number and types of rods and cones. "How we listen" clearly points out the fact which I believe everyone is aware of that when we listen to music, we only have a connection to it based on the sound and on a few occasions the words. The message being passed across.
ReplyDeleteFrom my point of view, hearing is the most trustworthy of all especially when it involves relating with others because we tend to hear the same thing when a common language is involved. Obviously we might have different meanings of what we heard but the words will sound alike to everyone. On the other hand, sight is the least trustworthy although the strongest of all. It is the least trustworthy because we each have different mindsets. We tend to see things based on our experience or how our rods and cones are structured. Just like the interior designer in Colors who had four cones. she had a wider variety of colors than most people do. Sometimes what we see is controlled by our mind. It might not even exist but our mind creates it. Sight is the strongest of all because it is what defines us. It makes us unique. It makes us stand out. What you see is completely different from what I see. This gives me a sense of individuality.
After listening to the podcast, I can say that at first I thought our sense of vision was untrustworthy, because of how it plays tricks with us, but by the end of the podcast I think our sense of vision is sometimes trustworthy and sometimes not. I think this because our eyes like to play tricks on us, by showing us what we want to see, what we like to see. What we see is what we eventually think and it is up to our brain to display these images to our eyes. It is trustworthy because this is where we get to see the world and our life, we then get to see how it turns out to be. This situation is the same as our sense of hearing, we sometimes choose to hear what we want to hear and decipher words in a whole different way, and we also hear things how they exactly turn out, sort of how in the text the author describes the different famous musical composers. Each composer is completely different, but how we hear them, it's the same music. The most trustworthy sense’s in my opinion are touch and smell, because these sense’s certainly help humans in life or death situations, you can smell fire, or smelly stuff, you can feel heat, touch dogs, these sense’s help us to live and help us to organize the complexities of life. The least trustworthy sense is taste. Yes, we may think everything tastes good, but sometimes it can kill us, like poison, which our taste buds can’t really taste. Some people may think that a certain food isn’t spicy, but then I may this it is spicy, so our taste buds aren’t reliable all the time. But I can always say, if it looks good, i’ll eat it.
ReplyDeleteWithin the radio podcast “colors” and the short reading “How we listen”, both give real world examples on why and how our senses help us and how some may deceive us. I believe that our sense of sight is the most trustworthy out of all are senses and i think that our sense of taste may be the most deceitful. Even though the eyes may be deceived, it is still very difficult, also between person to person our eye sight seems to be pretty identical. If I saw a giant garbage truck and ask the person ask to me what they see, they wouldn’t say a horse, they would still see a garage truck. This example show how our sight is most trustworthy cause we can even get a third party prospective and the outcome would still be the same. This isn’t necessary the same with taste, the taste bud on the tongue are the mouths comparison to a finger print, no one’s taste in the exactly the same, so you couldn’t get every bodies opinion to be shared. Yet that is not the biggest flaw within taste, every seven years your taste buds shift and change, so something you hated as a child you might love as an adult. This makes you not really trust if you like a certain food or not.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with you when you say that sight is the most trustworthy, because I am colorblind. Although some people are able to notice different colors more than others such as the women who had tetra cones, there are humans who lack certain cones. I, being color blind, am not able to see certain spectrums of red. I have a towel that my wife insists is purple, but I insist that the towel is blue. When doing the "color blind" tests, there are numbers, shapes, and letters I do not see, therefore I do not believe that sight is the most trustworthy of the five senses. This can also be seen with the monkeys. Although they possess the red cone, they do not see red. When injected with the virus to enable them to see red, they still did not see red although they possessed the ability to.
ReplyDeleteI also disagree with you when you say that sight is the most trustworthy, because like many say, " The eyes will deceive you" . I feel deeply this because you can be tricked into seeing something that is not there. The mind and the eyes can play tricks on you. In the times of being old, most say that they see dark shadows and frightening objects. It causes the person to be terrified. In "How We Listen" , he talks about how we listen to music. Which is very fascinating to me , considering i love music. I feel like you listen to what you want to listen to , based on your mood. I believe hearing the most trustworthy. Because listening to someone's voice, is great. You can tell how they feel in just their voice. If you sit down and listen to the things going around. You can relax and just live in the moment.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading your post, How we Listen by Aaron Copland and listening to the Colors podcast, I have to say that I agree with you that sight is our most trustworthy sense and that hearing is the least trustworthy one. Although it is possible to live a fulfilling life if you are blind or deaf, being deaf might be preferred over being blind if one had to choose a disability. For the people out there who are deaf, they are still able to see what is happening with the world around them and they are even able to communicate with others through their own language, American sign language. There is however a similar language for blind people, known as braille. A blind woman could be told that she is sitting in a room where the color of the walls is blue but she has no way of knowing for sure that it is actually true. On the other hand, the deaf person is able to easily see what color it is and not have to worry about whether someone is being deceitful to them.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading “How we learn” and listening to “colors”, I must say my view point changed during both. When reading “How we learn”, I felt as if our hearing was the most reliable. After listening to the podcast, it changed. I believe that vision is our most reliable sense. A lot of people may say sight is the most reliable; because everyone views the world in different perspectives. For example, with colors what I might consider black someone else may consider blue. If you really think about it the misconception can also happen with hearing. This is demonstrated when it comes to people’s music taste. We all don’t like the same genre’s and artist. With vision, you can deny what is right in front of you. You may see something different from someone else, but it doesn’t change the overall object. With hearing, you can turn sound into whatever you want to. You can even change the entire objective. With vision, you can change the characteristics but you can’t change the overall message. Over all I feel as if vision is our most reliable and hearing can be the least.
ReplyDeleteAfter listening to the radio lab "Colors" and reading the short essay "How We Listen" by Aaron Copland, I think that the least trustworthy sense is our sight and the most trustworthy is tactioception, which is touch. This is because in the radio lab podcast “Colors” they explain Isaac Newtons theory of whether color truly exists or is something within each of our minds. I always thought about this concept too hard and i believe that it is impossible to know whether color is perceived the same from person to person and if for example, my blue really looks like your red. I also believe that touch is the most trustworthy because everyone has this sense. We can use any part of our bodies to touch but our hands are the most useful. We can sense things textures, temperature, moisture and more. Touch can very rarely go wrong since it is such a concrete sense and one that is most used even without noticing. Our nerves are always feeling the environment around us and we subconsciously but it in the background of our minds but it is always reliably there for us.
ReplyDelete