During the pandemic when the population was required to wear masks, I noticed that I was saying "huh" and "excuse me" a lot more. I began to wonder if I was having difficulty with my hearing, or lack of, so to speak. This semester my courses were a pairing of Perception and Cognitive Psycology, and it was then, that I learned that most of our sensory experiences are muliti-dimensional and involve different qualities (Goldstein,43,2019). I was having a multisensory issue.
My courses taught me that, if a discussion is complicated, you're lip-reading. most lip-reading is an implicit skill, making it an automatic function. I never realized that I lived most of my life the "McGurk effect" way, meaning that what I saw was over-ridding what I heard. When posed with a problem of not being able to supplement my hearing with lip-reading, I was struggling to comprehend the words that were coming out of peoples mouths, which is a major problem for someone in the service industry.
The knowledge that I could over come this issue, without the help of a doctor was a relief. Knowing that cross-sensory brain plasticity would save the day by rewiring my hard drive was gift of my education process.
You really hit on Multi-dimensional perception by having to wear a mask. We are noticing how much we rely on all of our senses and how we are cross functional or not. I would guess that we rely on certain senses that we are most familiar with instead of all our senses. I myself listen more than looking at lips, you rely on lip reading this is all cool and makes us who we are.
ReplyDeleteI also found myself struggling to understand others when wearing masks. This experience with the pandemic really shows how we perceive sound and language with multiple senses.
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