Monetary Value of My Senses, Part Three: Hearing
I know you have been reading this series with interest and wondering when I am going to get to your favorite sense. Probably most of you have been thinking that I don't value my senses enough. I am sure that if I got letters that is what they would say and they would be kind of pitying. I don't get letters however probably because all of you are too shy to write in and tell me that you were moved to poetic grief when I told you how little my sense of smell meant to me.
Well we are down to the last two "main" senses so perhaps you can work up the courage to write something like "you would give up the ability to ever hear a Beethoven sonata again for mere mercenary reasons! Oh boor." I would appreciate that. So on with the article.
1) Hearing-based depth perception. Can people do this? I seem to recall hearing somewhere that people can do this. Apparently it has something to do with our having two ears? And it's why the skin on the outside of our ears is crinkled like it is? It seems like people should be able to do this. So let's assume you can triangulate with the two ears to tell from where a sound is coming.
Well maybe you can. All I know is that whenever the doorbell rings I startle and look around like a bomb went off in my head. Eventually I realize that was the doorbell, look in that direction, and calm down. This happens all the time. And I cannot pick people out of a crowd when they are shouting my name. I have to look around and see whose mouth is moving. I guess I can tell whether a sound is coming from the left or the right. Upon reflection. But that might just be an illusion. I would sell this "sense" for $100. You can buy a lot with a hundred dollars if you shop around.
2) That subwoofer thing where you "hear" with your general nerves. That's cool, I guess. It feels gratifyingly like a massage. It lets you know when an explosion is going on (as if you didn't know otherwise). But does any good music really happen in such low frequencies? No. $200,000.
3) General hearing. I thought about it for a long time but I guess you can't break hearing down any more than this*. It's the best distal sense, more useful than scent, and far less grating than vision. You would not expect someone who writes a blog, can't talk on the telephone, and isn't very good at any aspect of the "music" thing to say so but I value it very highly. A world of deafness would be very pathetic. I like to whistle to myself. And I wouldn't even be able to hear myself talk. How disconcerting that would be. A little like being a ghost. One hundred million dollars for the lot.**
*We will talk about inner-ear-balance stuff later on.
** I am aware of the decreasing marginal utility of actual money. I am aware that for such large figures as this the value of money is non-linear. Please consider dollars in this case to refer to abstract units of value rather than actual George Washington dollars. Thus a trillion dollars would be exactly twice as valuable to me as 500 billion dollars, even though a trillion dollar bills would only be slightly more valuable than 500 billion dollar bills.
Well we are down to the last two "main" senses so perhaps you can work up the courage to write something like "you would give up the ability to ever hear a Beethoven sonata again for mere mercenary reasons! Oh boor." I would appreciate that. So on with the article.
1) Hearing-based depth perception. Can people do this? I seem to recall hearing somewhere that people can do this. Apparently it has something to do with our having two ears? And it's why the skin on the outside of our ears is crinkled like it is? It seems like people should be able to do this. So let's assume you can triangulate with the two ears to tell from where a sound is coming.
Well maybe you can. All I know is that whenever the doorbell rings I startle and look around like a bomb went off in my head. Eventually I realize that was the doorbell, look in that direction, and calm down. This happens all the time. And I cannot pick people out of a crowd when they are shouting my name. I have to look around and see whose mouth is moving. I guess I can tell whether a sound is coming from the left or the right. Upon reflection. But that might just be an illusion. I would sell this "sense" for $100. You can buy a lot with a hundred dollars if you shop around.
2) That subwoofer thing where you "hear" with your general nerves. That's cool, I guess. It feels gratifyingly like a massage. It lets you know when an explosion is going on (as if you didn't know otherwise). But does any good music really happen in such low frequencies? No. $200,000.
3) General hearing. I thought about it for a long time but I guess you can't break hearing down any more than this*. It's the best distal sense, more useful than scent, and far less grating than vision. You would not expect someone who writes a blog, can't talk on the telephone, and isn't very good at any aspect of the "music" thing to say so but I value it very highly. A world of deafness would be very pathetic. I like to whistle to myself. And I wouldn't even be able to hear myself talk. How disconcerting that would be. A little like being a ghost. One hundred million dollars for the lot.**
*We will talk about inner-ear-balance stuff later on.
** I am aware of the decreasing marginal utility of actual money. I am aware that for such large figures as this the value of money is non-linear. Please consider dollars in this case to refer to abstract units of value rather than actual George Washington dollars. Thus a trillion dollars would be exactly twice as valuable to me as 500 billion dollars, even though a trillion dollar bills would only be slightly more valuable than 500 billion dollar bills.
posted by apk01004 at 6:38 PM
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