When I taught Perception to undergraduate and graduate students it was often like pulling teeth. Most had signed up for psychology assuming it would be soft on the science end and long on the “let me understand what makes me and others tick” dimension. Not many were interested in learning the admittedly hard details of how our visual and auditory systems function, and the minute they realized that physics, chemistry and biology were involved, as well as some aspects of neuroscience, panic set in.
I am exaggerating, but only a little. To keep them going I often had to add something that augmented the physiological details by some human interest story or some such. We watched a lot of movies …. we looked at a lot of fun illusions; we discussed the implications for hearing families with deaf children to learn ALS or providing cochlear implants. We talked about the psychological consequences for blind people of regaining vision (you’d be surprised, it does not make them happy.)
The links I am attaching today are just such material – one is simply a demonstration from one of those Dance TV shows that people who are deaf can dance as IF they hear the music.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVv6VgBF5Hc
The others are more scientific: one describes a suit that allows deaf people to experience music. The other explores how augmentation with soundscapes allows blind people to recognize familiar objects. “The augmented reality system allowed blind people to accurately classify 78 percent of objects they were presented in one of three groups: people, everyday objects, or textured patterns. Moreover, the soundscapes emitted by the system also portrayed information about a person’s position, for example, among other details.”
All are interesting and would have been fair game in class – whatever it takes to stimulate interest and helps to overcome fear of science.
And so we close this week on sound – you heard all about it…..
So he digs a 30 meter long passage and has the thinnest member of the local spelunking club climb into Bruniquel cave in France. Another almost half kilometer on they find something mind boggling: “a vast chamber where several stalagmites had been deliberately broken. Most of the 400 pieces had been arranged into two rings—a large one between 4 and 7 metres across, and a smaller one just 2 metres wide. Others had been propped up against these donuts. Yet others had been stacked into four piles. Traces of fire were everywhere, and there was a mass of burnt bones. ” I am quoting from the attached article here: 
But now to my real wondering: how can it be that even in science there is so much happening due to pure chance? I am not referring to the determination of locals to explore their environs. The cave was discovered in 1990. By 1999 archeologist Francois Rouzaud had decided, by means of carbon dating the bear bones, that the stalagmite rings were older than any know cave painting, some 46.000 years or so, and thus could not have been the work of Homo Sapiens but the Neanderthals. He died of a heart attack that very year. Almost 15 years later, another caver who is also a specialist in stalagmites happens to vacation in the region. She hears about the cave, tests the stalagmites themselves with more modern means and voilà, they are actually 176,500 years old, give or take a few millennia. Given the nature of the rings, and the absence of functional items, or tools, scientists are now speculating this was a ritual place. Furthermore there are red and black streaks that are applied to diverse areas, hinting at the controlled use of fire hot enough to crack rocks. Views of social organization and communication patterns of Neanderthals are revised as we speak, following these discoveries. 
I got interested in the people who Darwin selected as correspondents after reading Roger McDonald’s Mr. Darwin’s Shooter, a book that tells the story from the perspective of Sym Covington, fiddle boy on the HMS Beagle and later man servant to Darwin. He ends up in Australia, still corresponding with Darwin and sending specimens collected there, increasingly deaf from his days of shooting rifles at Darwin’s behest. How would it have felt to have been so instrumental in collecting data (if only in the form of shot specimen) and yet to receive little recognition? Foreshadowing of the fate of graduate students, last on the authoring list? How did he reconcile his fervent religious beliefs with his support for someone seen to pull the rug up from under them? (Which, by the way, goes for Darwin’s wife as well.) (Review of the book: 
