Episode 65 - Hearing

Transcript

David: 0:04

Hello and welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:11

Where we discuss big ideas, but ideally in a fun and chill and exciting way. I'm your co-host, Dr. Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:20

I'm your other co-host and Ellie's trusty friend, uh, Dr. David Peña-Guzmán. Sorry, I, laughed at the end. Hold on.

Ellie: 0:27

You just laughed. You know it's all good. You can laugh at your own name, David. This is the third episode of our series on the senses, which you can totally listen to separately, you don't need to listen to them in order. I will say this one feels kinda special though since podcasting is an auditory medium.

David: 0:45

We love hearing at Overthink. Hear us, hear you.

Ellie: 0:50

We do. So I read a book years ago about how one of the major detracting factors to people's happiness is noise pollution. And you know, I absolutely hate vague references to books without citations, I cannot for the life of me remember where I read this. It was probably a positive psychology book on happiness because I was really into those in college.

David: 1:16

I, You really do hate those references without books. For our listeners, I'm to talk about an idea if I cannot locate the book on this podcast. It is, it is the bane of my existence.

Ellie: 1:27

You're allowed to talk about own ideas. I just don't like it when like research shows and we can't cite one to five, ideally, studies on the research that is showing that, right.

David: 1:37

Well, either way, I'm happy that you're over to the dark side and mentioning ideas without having a citation for them. Ellie, I think we're making progress here.

Ellie: 1:47

I can't believe you want to just stand by that, David. Let your, let yourself be the cohost who likes say shit without backing things. So don't forget, we both academics and presumably, thus have a deep investment in ethics.

David: 2:00

Yes, I, And we do, and we do. We just don't have the same citation practices, and that's different. Um, and I, I will stand by that. Now, your comment about noise pollution is hitting really close to home right now, uh, for me, on a personal level, because I just moved to a new neighborhood in San Francisco, I now live in the Tenderloin, is the noisiest neighborhood in the Bay Area. For a few days, actually for a few weeks, I've been having difficulty sleeping and even recording. If you listen to some of those YouTube interviews, you can hear the ambulances just rushing past my house because I am on an ambulance pathway, and so I'm really polluted by noise at this moment.

Ellie: 2:43

David, I have been having my own struggles lately with this, and I'm sorry you're dealing with that. Not to like suddenly just jump on my own example, but this also feels close to home because there is major construction going on next door to my house right now, and I curse it every day as I'm trying to focus on my work. Like I wasn't even getting relief from earplugs, so I took to loudly listening to music while working, which I never do. I really like working in silence for the most part. But I just put on the first thing that I found on Spotify, which my parents share my Spotify account, was medieval church music written by Hildegard of Bingen.

David: 3:22

Um, yeah, so now I, I'm, I'm also experimenting, uh, with different kinds of music and noise. Uh, so for starters, I started putting a white noise machine on at night to drown out the noise from the outside, that has made a significant difference. Although, I am a little bit burnt because I have been socially roasted times for revealing I listen to white noise at the gym instead of like clubby, pumpy music. And my friends every like around, they all think I'm a sociopath because I'm just working out and doing exercise to brrrrrr, but I find it really relaxing. I find it very calming.

Ellie: 4:06

Oh, you're just, you just need that space to think.

David: 4:11

About my next murder.

Ellie: 4:14

Um, I was thinking about your research, but okay.

David: 4:17

Yeah, murder and research together. Who cares? Um uh, but the point here is that my new living quarters have really clarified for me the importance of the soundscape that we inhabit and the power that it has over our daily life. You know, from our moods to our social interactions. And I also ran into showing that noise is one of the most important determinants for student success. So students who live in noisier neighborhoods statistically perform less well than peers who come from quieter neighborhoods, because that's usually a marker of class. And you know, not only because noise puts one on edge, but also because it is an unremitting distractor that takes you out of your focus study or your exam or you know, just thinking about a problem. And so students in these noisier neighborhoods, according to this research, just can't focus on their homework as well and so they eventually start internalizing their low performance as I must be a bad student. So then that sensorial pollution or overload becomes a psychological polluter. And you know, obviously, again, like I said, there are clear class components here because it's usually members of the working class that live in the noisier corners of the urban space.

Ellie: 5:42

Yeah, and I think indeed one hallmark of modern life is that many of us, especially urban dwellers, are constantly surrounded by sound and the ability escape

David: 5:53

Mm-hmm.

Ellie: 5:54

that sound is a privilege. This way that so many of us are surrounded by sound constantly in our lives would have been truly unthinkable for humans in the majority of our life as a species. This idea that we are constantly surrounded by sound is a blip in the history of humanity.

David: 6:13

Mm-hmm.

Ellie: 6:13

Zooming motorcycles, circling helicopters, train whistles, swooshing airplanes, sirens, the hiss of the subway. We are subject to constant noise, not to mention the devices of many of our homes, including say, the buzz of the refrigerator or the gush of the air conditioner. Um, if you have a window unit like I do

David: 6:35

Yes. Yes.

Ellie: 6:35

it's really loud. I can't even watch TV and have it on

David: 6:37

Yes.

Ellie: 6:38

at the same time. But maybe if I had a fancier air conditioner, it would be quieter.

David: 6:41

Well, and, and the deafening silence that you suddenly become aware of retroactively when the AC goes off, where you're like, oh, I thought it was silent before, but now I'm realizing how much noise I was being dis— how, how much it was distracting me, without me realizing just like barely below the threshold of conscious awareness.

Ellie: 7:00

It's so awful about the students too.

David: 7:02

Yeah, of course. And I mean, this is one way of interpreting gated communities that they're getting themselves, not so much from physical contact, but from the noisiness of the surrounding landscape. But I feel like when we think about the ills of modern life, noise pollution isn't one of the things that comes to mind. So we can think about noise, we become aware of noise, and it registers as noise. But not really as pollution, which by definition indicates an excess of the thing in itself and, and an excess that takes on a poisonous quality. And so then the very term noise pollution, I think, forces us to rethink our relationship to noise because noise can indeed be toxic and noxious and polluting.

Ellie: 7:52

Exactly, this is why I was so struck by the point in this book that I read about, its being linked to decreasing wellbeing.

David: 8:00

Yeah, this nameless book, nameless research. Um, no, but I, I, I think this speaks to a broader point about our sense of hearing, which is how much our culture takes it for granted.

Ellie: 8:15

Today we are talking about hearing.

David: 8:18

How does the sense of hearing make its way into our everyday lives?

Ellie: 8:22

To what extent does the sense of self tie up with hearing and inner voice?

David: 8:27

And how does Deaf culture call upon us to retool our understanding of the importance of hearing for human life?

Ellie: 8:40

As we discussed with noise pollution, one of the things that seems really important about hearing is that we have a very limited ability to shut out sounds. If we can shut them out at all. And because of this hearing is sometimes considered the most passive of the senses. If I don't want to see something, I can just close my eyes. I don't want to taste something, I can refuse to open my mouth or plug my nose. But the sound of buzz saw just besieges me.

David: 9:07

Let alone the sound of a ringing in my ear that I just can't seem to shake.

Ellie: 9:11

Oh yes. I read a paper on tinnitus actually in preparation for this episode, which talks about how tinnitus is associated with anxiety and fatigue because it forces someone to be constantly vigilant and that not only will the ringing in their ears continue, but get even worse. So it's not just about the actual annoyance of the ear ringing, but it's about the worry about what that means for the future.

David: 9:36

Wait, can I ask you a question about this research? Because is it that tinnitus is caused by anxiety and fatigue, or is it that anxiety and fatigue make a ringing in your ear not go away and it becomes constant? Because then you're thinking about it all the time?

Ellie: 9:53

Neither the etiology is unclear, so we don't exactly know what causes tinnitus, but the idea is that if you have tinnitus, you are more likely to have anxiety and fatigue.

David: 10:03

I see. I see.

Ellie: 10:04

There is some suggestion that those who are predisposed to anxiety may be more likely to develop tinnitus, but the the point is really that if you have tinnitus, it's going to cause anxiety and fatigue for you.

David: 10:15

Oh this is now reminding me of the article that we discussed in our episode on vision, the the Hans Jonas article, "The Nobility of Sight." One of the things that he says there is that because hearing is relatively passive, most that we can do is decide whether to be in a state of attentive readiness about sound, because otherwise we have zero control. Hearing, we are entirely dependent on something external that outside our control, and that basically means that we can't choose the object of auditory experience in the same way that we can choose the objects of visual experience. So again, when I look at a field, I can let my eyes move this way and that way. But when I hear a soundscape, my ears cannot wander, our ears at some point, he says, are at the mercy of environmental action, and he says that action intrudes upon us without asking and decides for us what is going to be the most salient object of our auditory perception.

Ellie: 11:20

Yeah. Yeah. So I hadn't thought about that way. Like I'm at a restaurant, for instance, I can to some extent choose to zone in on another person's conversation to just the din of the restaurant or the sound of clinking glasses, because I want to overhear what they're saying. But if they're super, super loud, then I have no choice but to listen to them. There's a point at which, like you said, the environment chooses the sound that I have to listen to. Same with the buzz saw, right? Or the ambulance in your case.

David: 11:48

Yeah, and I think this is a really good point because it adds that corrective to this interpretation of hearing as the most passive of the senses or as entirely passive because it does mean that we have a basic form of control, some kind of zoom function with the ears, right? Like you can zoom in on a conversation happening somewhere else, or you can zoom out of that conversation, uh, with the ears. In general, I think the point stands that we have a weaker sense of agency and voluntary control. When it comes to sensory input, in the case of hearing, so even if we can selectively attend to certain sounds, we simply cannot not hear a sudden sound in our environment. Right? A glass breaks in restaurant, you have to hear it. You, you can't not.

Ellie: 12:37

Yeah, and this sounds like something that one of the thinkers that we talked about in touch episode discusses in the book The Five Senses and this is the thinker whom we were calling in that episode, Michel Serres, because I thought Serres is how you pronounce it. And as it turns out, it's one of those weird French names that's from the southwestern region of France, the region closest to Spain. I find that lot of names from that region. I don't know how to pronounce in French, even though I speak French. And so I was thinking that it was like Serres, but it turns out it's actually pronounced like Serres. Anyway, this is a digression. Um, mea culpa, with the pronounce of Michel Serres' name.

David: 13:17

For what it's worth, I also said, Serres, always have said that. So I think we're both equally out of the loop.

Ellie: 13:23

It really looks to me as a French speaker, like it would be pronounced Serres, so apologies. I'm going to say Michel Serres now. Serres says that vision provides a presence whereas sound does not. And this would be another main difference between hearing and the other senses. So the other senses like vision and touch give us presences and objects, but hearing

David: 13:47

Mm-hmm.

Ellie: 13:47

gives us traces and events. The ontology is so much spookier.

David: 13:54

Oh my gosh, yes. Traces and events as opposed to, what did you say? Uh,

Ellie: 13:58

Objects and presences.

David: 13:59

Yeah. Objects and presences. Well, and it's not just the ontology that is a little bit spookier to use your term. It's the process whereby sounds become hearing that a little bit spooky in itself because hearing, the act of hearing happens in three stages. First, you have the outer ear that has a very funny shape, you know, this kind of vortex of flesh, it acts as a funnel for sound. So it whirlwinds the sound into the inner ear. Then the, the sound reaches the eardrum, the eardrum moves a little bone that then moves another little bone, that then moves another little bone.

Ellie: 14:46

Ooh. Like, like domino situation.

David: 14:48

Yes, very much so. And so the movement is now being transferred through three different bones, the last bone then presses against the inner ear, which is filled with fluid. And when the fluid vibrates from the pressure of that last bone, the hairs on the cochlea moves sending the signal then to the auditory portion of the brain. And you have a shift from one kind of movement to another. So you begin with airwaves then become movement of bones then become liquid waves before finally becoming electrical synapsis. It's just a, a lot of transformations of energy along the way. And the whole process is, somewhat slow, all things considered, at least compared to, you know, the movement of light, for example. So we're talking about a very different time scale here.

Ellie: 15:45

That's fascinating, David, because it also corresponds to an idea you see in quite a lot of philosophy that associates hearing with time and um, you know, you're talking about it on a physiological level, but I think we can see this in a variety of different ways, because hearing is the most clearly temporal of the senses. To hear a noise requires that it unfolds for more than an instant, which is different from the other senses, especially from vision, where I can behold something with a single glance, literally in milliseconds. So what you've just

David: 16:22

Mm-hmm.

Ellie: 16:22

been talking about

David: 16:23

Yeah.

Ellie: 16:23

is the temporality of the ear, but I also think there's the temporality of the sound itself, and maybe those are really correlative, right? In fact, one of the most famous accounts of the philosophy of time uses listening to a melody as an example, this is Edmund Husserl's phenomenological work on internal time consciousness. Basically, Husserl points out that listening to a melody cannot happen in an instant, right? It requires development over time. When I'm hearing a particular note or chord, I'm also hearing the shadings of the previous notes or chords that just heard, and I am also what he calls protending or orienting myself towards the future sound that I might hear. So when we perceive a melody, we distinguish the tone that is given now, what is perceived, what we're hearing, from those which have gone by, which are no longer perceived right, we're hearing them in the present. And so there's a way that the sound is stretched out such that it is a temporal object. And Husserl says that, sure, we say that the tone that I'm currently listening to is the perceived object, but it's actually also the case that the entire melody is perceived. Even though only the now point actually is. And so this approach to hearing a melody shows us that perception is not an instantaneous affair, but rather develops over time. And this leads Husserl to assert that perception is extended in the past and reaches toward the future, which I think is really different from the view of perception that you get stemming, say from vision, which is this instantaneous and detached approach.

David: 18:09

Yeah no, that's, that's right. The notion of synthesis here, uh, playing a really important role because for Husserl the object of perception is never the note necessarily, it's the melody. Um, at least when we're paying attention to something that is organized into a melodic structure. And one way to think about it is that if you had the same notes, but organized in a different way, you would have a very different object of auditory experience, even it's the same notes in the same number of notes. In fact, even if you had the same number of notes and the same notes organized in the same order, with different spacing in between them so that you stretch it out in time, would have a very different experience of that. Like playing something in slow motion, for example, speeding something up. And what I, what I really like about this, and I think this is what you're alluding to, Ellie, with this notion of retention and pretention is that it means that the present is always haunted by what comes before and what comes after in a virtual way. So the past and the future are always there, virtually in the present. Not positively, but virtually.

Ellie: 19:24

Yeah. One example that you can think about in this regard as well is the fact that if I play a particular note, it's going to sound very different, this is sort of following up on what you were just saying, David, the notes before it are going to shape whether I hear this song as being in the minor scale or in a major scale, then is turn going to affect the emotions of it, right? And so there's this way that, as we said with Serres, the auditory object is um, not present, but is made up of traces and events because it is stretched out in time. And so I think this gets us back to Serres' point, that hearing involves hearing traces rather than presences.

David: 20:06

Yeah, and the comment that you made about expectation about what you think is going to happen next in light of what has happened before is something that we see at work, not just in music, but in language as well. The phenomenologist, Alva Noë gives a really good example of this, where he says, I think he was in Germany at the time. And he speaks German and he also speaks English. And he was going on public transportation and had been speaking one language before for a while. So he was in a mental set of thinking in one language and expecting his interlocutors to use that language, I think German, and at some point somebody in the metro speaks to him in English and he's fully bilingual and he just couldn't understand the words. It was gibberish for him because that haunting presence of the past was so strong it made the present in that moment utterly incomprehensible, even though it was spoken in a language that he masters. And that's that I think a lot of bilingual people have had of just like past expectation, determining the meaning of the present, not just in connection to music, but in connection to everyday speech.

Ellie: 21:22

This is a really interesting example that I think highlights way that our perceptions are always culturally encoded. A lot of the history of philosophy has gone wrong by assuming that we receive percept, like I receive bare sheer noises, rather than recognizing that sounds that we hear are always already being interpreted by us. And so when we hear something that is outside of our expectation, it is unintelligible for a moment, right? I don't hear a loud whirring noise over my apartment, I hear a helicopter. I remember one time when I was in Italy, I was up at the top of this beautiful villa alone after a hike and was just kind of like trolling the grounds, I heard the loudest sound ever it sounded like a giant airplane, but right over my head and I couldn't see anything to which it corresponded. And so I had this fantasy that it was like alien spaceship right above me. This was, this was well before Jordan Peele's Nope.

David: 22:26

Some abduction story.

Ellie: 22:28

Because I, I just couldn't place it. And so there was this moment of being like, this doesn't fit in. What do I do with what I am hearing? Bit of woo woo story than Alva Noë's story.

David: 22:42

Well, and this is what one of our experts that we interviewed on hearing for our YouTube series, Christina Rotolo, means when she talks about ways of hearing that we have to cultivate the ability to hear. And that takes time, and that happens culturally, it happens socially, it happens historically. So I'm here thinking even about I go out into nature, you know, there is an entire soundscape in the natural world that I don't know how to interpret. I don't know what it is that I am hearing when I am in the wild, somebody who has spent a good amount of time interpreting those sounds has that framework of expectation in place to say something like oh, well the cicadas are acting up tonight, which means the following. So they, they have a lot more discernment about differences those of us without that kind of training would just bulldoze over.

Ellie: 23:37

I want to mention one other point that I think comes out of this experience of hearing that has to do with this idea we talked about earlier, that we hear traces rather than objects themselves. Because one thing, to get meta for a moment, that is quite interesting is that listeners are hearing our voices right now, weeks after we have recorded this episode. And you and I, David, contrary to what listeners may be picturing, you know, you might be thinking about us in the same room, we are hundreds of miles apart, and yet your voice is coming directly to me through my headphones and directly to listeners through their headphones or phones. And you might say that this is a peculiar feature of technology, right? It's technology that allows us to hear things at such great distances. But I think that those technological advances that we've seen in 100 or 150 years regarding sound, the invention of the phonograph, of the telephone, of CD players, of headphones, all kinds of auditory technological advancements have been enabled precisely by the fact hearing is a distal sense, that it allows us to relate, not in terms of a present object, but in terms of what Serres is going to call traces.

David: 25:05

Yeah, and I, I think that distal dimension really does mean that we, especially when you how slow sound is relative to the other senses, think about something like a lightning storm where you see the lightning right away, but then it takes a while for the sound to emerge, means that there is a really important gap between the source of the sound and then the experience or the perception of the sound that it produces. And this is a point that Derrida makes in some of his writings about technology and audio visual recordings of people that you know, it's not just that we are far away, it's also that by the time our listeners our voices, you and I could have died because there is a gap of time between those two ends. So there is that spectral dimension where we hear something, but we don't really know if the object that originally produced that is still there or not. And hence the element of the uncanny in hearing the voice of somebody that we know has died. Like when you know you have a voicemail or a video recording of somebody that passed away, it gives you really bizarre feeling of the presence of something that is absent and should no longer be present yet is.

Ellie: 26:25

But I want to also disambiguate what you just talked about with the voicemail and the video recording, because you can also watch a video of somebody after they have died.

David: 26:34

Yeah.

Ellie: 26:34

That video is showing you an image of them, which is ontologically distinct from the them that you would see ordinarily. And I think there's an argument to be made that the same is not true of hearing, that there is not an ontological difference between the trombone that you hear recorded and the trombone that you hear live. At least this is a view that some philosophers have held.

David: 27:02

Yes. And if that's the case, then it would mean that hearing somebody who has died, just only the voice without seeing them, would actually be the spookier phenomenon because it means that in principle, that person could still be around. I think this ontological difference can be understood in terms of our experience of causality at the level of perception. So when I see a person, the image of a person, and hear the sound, I immediately make a connection between that image and the sound in terms of cause and effect, whatever that object the person that is depicted is making the sound that I am hearing. But when we only have the sound without any visual correlate, we have the effect, but we don't have the cause. And so it means that there is costless effect just floating around that ambiguity about what truly caused the sound as an element of indeterminacy to our experience of sound, making ontologically distinct, as you said. One thing that came up for me when thinking about hearing is the way that we often use metaphors of hearing for understanding, sympathy, and empathy. As in the case I hear you.

Ellie: 28:39

Or in Chicago parlance heard.

David: 28:42

Did people say that in Chicago? Just heard.

Ellie: 28:46

I've been watching the Bear the TV show recently. It's so good. So that's what's coming to mind for me. It takes place in the Chicago restaurant industry. But what you're speaking to, I, I think, is also about the way that hearing is used as a way of thinking about recognition, how we recognize other people as subjects, whether that's through sympathy or empathy or something else. And in fact, some philosophers have suggested that actually how we recognize ourselves. George Herbert Mead, for instance, early 20th century philosopher and sociologist, argues that the very sense of self emerges socially through the experience of hearing ourselves speak.

David: 29:28

Oh, whoa. So it is that speaking, we come to know we are agents because we see the effects of our own activity?

Ellie: 29:38

Not even, it's not even about agency per se, it's more just about, although maybe kind of, it's more just about ourselves as a being in the world. So Mead believes that the essential feature of the self is, its reflexivity, ability to take itself as an object. And you might think that this means seeing yourself as an object, right? Most philosophies would thematize self-objectification as a visual or this objectification.

David: 30:10

Like in a mirror.

Ellie: 30:11

Exactly, exactly the mirror stage and Lacan, for instance. But Mead thinks that it is an auditory process through what he calls vocal gesture. Going back to something that you said earlier, David, about the way that hearing is often considered a passive sense. Mead thinks it's actually the passivity of the sense of hearing that provides for the experience of self. So let me explain how this works. Because I obviously find it really interesting.

David: 30:36

Well, yeah, I do too. I do too. It's fascinating.

Ellie: 30:38

Like getting, getting excited just talking about it. When we speak, the sound of our own voice, Mead says, assails our ears, just as it assails the ears of others. That is, we hear what we are saying in the same way that others hear them. This is different from other senses, so I might see or feel the movements of hands as others see or feel them. He notes that this is the case for those who are deaf. But the vocal gesture for those of us who hear has the least amount of gap between the way I experience it and the way others experience it. So I hear myself more similarly to how

David: 31:18

Hmm.

Ellie: 31:18

others hear me, and in fact, in same way that others hear me, whereas I don't see myself or touch myself in quite the same way that others see or touch me. And this means that for Mead, the vocal gesture has provided the medium of social organization and human society above all, because it's so deeply organizes not only our relations to others, but actually our relation to ourselves that a self emerges out of it.

David: 31:42

Yeah, no. And if the self emerges out of it, then definitely would have to be considered fundamental. Although I, I have to say, I find this view a little bit bizarre.

Ellie: 31:52

Oh yeah, it's for sure bizarre.

David: 31:54

I mean, but it's intuitive, right? I think a lot of people talk about there being an inner voice and hearing one's self speak as maybe the development of that inner voice that can happen on its own without externalization over time. But what's bizarre for me about this claim is the idea that we hear ourselves in the same way that other people hear us. And whenever I think about recognition, I always want to think about the role that mis-recognition plays in that logic of self recognition. Because I do think that there's always an element of mis-recognition that is at the core of subjectivity. And this is something that we have talked about in connection to the mirror stage in connection division, right? That when you look at a mirror, you recognize yourself, but there's always something off. In that case, the mirror is inverted. And so we always have this element of mis-recognition where something doesn't match. I think that that mis recognition also happens at the level of auditory experience and hearing oneself speak, which is why most people, when they hear a recording of their own voice, hate the way they sound, even though other people say, that's exactly what you sound to us, that's, that's your voice.

Ellie: 33:12

Mm-hmm.

David: 33:12

I think that voice that we hear, maybe because of the closeness of our mouth to our ear and because it resonates inside our head, is actually fundamentally different than the way other people hear us. There is that gap between our inner voice and and our outer voice. But for the record, I also just really love the notion thinking of the self as having this inner speech. That's just not the way I think about experience.

Ellie: 33:41

No, but whole point is that it doesn't have this inner speech. The whole point is that there's no difference the speech that one is saying and what others are hearing, that there's, that there's no gap there. I think I, I don't personally experience the hatred of hearing my own voice that others do, and maybe that's just because we have to listen to ourselves all time as we're, you know, spot checking our episodes before they get released. But I do find that, David, when you and I record, we have to turn off a feature that most video conferencing technologies have automatically, which is echo cancellation, which makes it so that you don't hear your own voice on the other person's computer as you are speaking. And you and I, because we have this feature off, unless we're wearing headphones, when we're on video together, we hear our own voices just like a split second after we speak.

David: 34:35

An echo yes.

Ellie: 34:37

It is, it is so frustrating for both of us.

David: 34:40

Drives me to murder.

Ellie: 34:42

It's impossible.

David: 34:42

That's how bad it is. Yes. No, but I, I mean, so I, I wonder the extent to which Mead's model of us hearing ourselves speak might not actually be better understood in terms of the automatic cancellation of the voice. For us, I think maybe our brain, I don't, I don't know if this is true now, I'm like full on speculating, but I wonder whether, it's not that we hear ourselves speak, it's actually that we tune out what we put out. So the brain knows the difference between are outside of our control versus those that are generated internally.

Ellie: 35:20

Yeah. I think that does get overlooked in Mead's account.

David: 35:24

And so I'm not sure that I buy the idea that I really hear my own voice, let alone that I hear it in the same way that others hear it. And I'm here reminded of a claim Wittgenstein says he thinks that our relationship to our own words that we utter is totally different from other people's words. And he even doubts that we hear ourselves at all. There is no such thing hearing my own voice back to me.

Ellie: 35:52

I think that might be right in the sense that it is so disorienting for us to hear the echo of our own voice when we are actually speaking. I think that that it's not it's not a normal experience. Right. So I'm personally really compelled by Mead's claim that the self emerges socially when we take a perspective on ourselves as an object. But I might buy the philosopher Karen Hanson's criticism that it's not the vocal gesture that really succeeds in doing this for us. At most, the vocal gesture might be one part of our development of the sense of self Hanson argues, but she just doesn't think that it can be the organizer of social life and the mechanism of self-creation in the way that Mead thinks it is.

David: 36:41

Yeah. And in fact, I think that hearing our own voices in the same way that we hear other people's voices is often seen as a sign of pathology if anything, rather than the normal course of child development or the development of a self. For example, thinking that you hear another voice when it's your own voice is a hallmark the diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Ellie: 37:08

Indeed researchers have argued that schizophrenia involves a disruption of the self, whereby one fails to recognize one's own activities, including inner speech or voices as one's own. The psychologist, Christopher Frith has some quite influential work on the idea that schizophrenia has to do with a breakdown of self-monitoring. So we might say then that non-pathological experience involves recognizing one's own voice in different way than one recognizes the voices of others, which is kind of the opposite of Mead's view, although it's also different from what you said a moment ago, David, which is that we don't hear our own voices at all, right. But either way, whether we're not hearing our own voices at all, or whether we're recognizing them differently from the way that we recognize the voices of others, I think the point here would be that what happens when we fail to recognize our voice as our own that we end up thinking it's coming from outside us.

David: 38:09

Yeah, no, and I think that view of schizophrenia as a disruption of the inner voice, or rather the projection of our inner voice onto an external source is pretty common, and it just shows how closely tied hearing or listening seem to be with our sense of self, especially in the medical imaginary. But I read an article on schizophrenia that argues that this inner speech model schizophrenia is precisely the wrong way to think about the phenomenon. Now the article is called Stop, Look, and Listen. And the authors basically argue that if you stop, look and listen to the phenomenon of schizophrenia you realize that so-called inner voice is not really there all because when we're just going through our everyday life, it's not as if we really have inherently linguistic flow of experience, right. It's not as if I look at the tree and a little voice in my head says this is a tree, then I turn a little bit to side and I see dog running, and then I have a thought in linguistic form that says the dog is running. It's not that there is language unfolding in and if that's the case that that's not happening, the authors say we need to no longer rely on the inner speech model for thinking about schizophrenia. And instead of thinking that schizophrenia is basically a misattribution of my inner speech onto external source, which thereby creates strange voices, we should think about schizophrenia. More as a disruption of the logic of self experience. And the way they talk about it is in terms of a form of hyper reflexivity. We become hyper reflexive when uh, schizophrenia enters the scene.

Ellie: 40:11

Almost as if we are not failing to objectify ourselves, but objectifying ourselves too much?

David: 40:19

That's exactly right. Normally there are a lot of processes that are going on to prop up our sense of self. And these are processes that we don't need to think about explicitly. They're just in the background, they're on autopilot and they need to be in the background, but in schizophrenia, all these implicit processes suddenly get pushed to the foreground and we start thinking about them too much. We become fixated on them, and that creates a pathological rumination loop. We just get stuck thinking about these background processes we start basically overthinking our subjectivity. So

Ellie: 41:01

Overthinking a word we often like here.

David: 41:05

and they use a really interesting example, like the basic bodily movements that are needed for making coffee in the morning. You know, I get up, I reach for the coffee. And it's not as if I am really, I I do those while I'm still half asleep, right? I don't need to think consciously extend hand 20 centimeters to the left, down push on the top of the French press.

Ellie: 41:30

Such that you're like talking your talking to yourself or hearing yourself while you do that.

David: 41:34

Yes, exactly. And what happens in schizophrenia is that all those background movements then become the object of my attention. They become intentional objects and I start focusing on them. And once I, I start thinking about them, it actually disrupts the natural flow of the movements themselves. And it sort of paralyzes me. And the way the authors talk about it is that this hyper reflexivity means that we start experiencing our own bodies, basically as a machine, and we start becoming alienated from our bodies. And eventually this alienation makes us lose our sense of reality. Like, am I real? If I have to think about these movements that now seem unorganic and mechanical?

Ellie: 42:25

Derealization.

David: 42:26

Yes, that derealization Ellie is, is what they say schizophrenia is at its core. It is an alienation of ourselves from our own subjectivity that creates the sense that nothing is real.

Ellie: 42:41

And it might be interesting to link this back to our earlier conversation about the temporality of hearing, although I do hear your point, David. Haha. I hear your point, that this model of schizophrenia is trying to push against notion of schizophrenia as a disruption of inner speech specifically. But I still think there's a way that both inner speech and a sense of temporality are potentially disrupted here. Right. And there's hyper reflexivity that is taking you out of the flow of time.

David: 43:12

Yes. And the only lingering question there would be to what extent are committed to the notion that what is happening in the head is a kind of speech when we are going through everyday experience as opposed to speech being a model that we project retroactively when we thematize our inner life. And my own sense is that speech is something that we project onto thought when we have to talk about what's happening. But it's not as if thought itself is linguistic. If you're enjoying, Overthink, please consider supporting the podcast by joining our Patreon. We are an independent, self-supporting podcast, and as a subscriber, you can help us cover our key production costs, gain access to our exclusive digital library of bonus content and more.

Ellie: 44:14

In thinking about the senses, might be tempted to believe that because different senses make different kinds of information available to us. The absence of those senses would necessarily be lack. But disability activists and theorists call this conclusion into question. I think this is really a big aspect of critical disability studies, which is a burgeoning, contemporary and interdisciplinary field. David, tell us about this.

David: 44:39

Yeah. Experts in this field of critical disability studies make the argument that the impairment or the absence of a sense, such as hearing, need not and should not be interpreted as a lack, as an absence, or as a disability, it can be interpreted in a number of ways. So, for instance, in case of hearing, a number of Deaf culture experts argue that we should think about deafness as a unique culture rather than as a disability. Robert Sparrow, who specializes on this subject, this argument in an essay entitled Defending Deaf Culture, where he says, deafness is not a lack. It is not an absence. It is a culture with its own structure, its own history, of course, its own language. He says that there are two reasons for adopting a cultural understanding of deafness. One, and this is a really important one, is that this is already how members of the Deaf community see themselves. They see themselves as a political and cultural minority, and not as people who have experienced some kind of tragedy related to the lack of a particular sensory modality. That's not their self understanding. And the second reason for thinking about deafness culturally is that members of the Deaf community have their own language, and that is, of course, American Sign Language, which clearly maps onto our legal and political categories of what it means to be a cultural group. We often associate that with a shared heritage, history, language, as well as a few other things, but that's the one that's relevant.

Ellie: 46:27

Okay. And is the claim that all people who are born with or develop hearing impairments of different kinds are automatically members of this culture? Or is it a culture that individuals then have to actively seek out and participate in to be included in? Cause I think we don't normally think about culture as things that you are literally born into by virtue of your embodiment alone.

David: 46:53

Yes. No, you're raising a really good point, Ellie here because. So first, let's take a step back because we need to differentiate between two

different terms: 47:01

deaf, with a lower case D and Deaf with an upper case D. Now the first, with the lower case, refers to people with any kind of hearing impairment that changes how they relate to the world. The second Deaf with an upper case is people who have a hearing impairment and who also identify as members of capital D Deaf culture. And so Deaf people with a capital D build a significant portion of their identity, not the totality of it, of course, around their membership in this group. And so you are not automatically capital D Deaf if you are born or become lower case D deaf. But Sparrow does recognize that Deaf culture is kind of unique relative to other cultures because it does have this biological component or this biological requirement that other cultures just don't have, right? You don't have to have any kind of embodiment to be French or to be Mexican, there does have to be this requirement of some kind of hearing impairment for you to be a member of Deaf culture. And it's also a little bit bizarre because typically cultural identity is passed vertically from parents to their kids. But that's not the case with Deaf culture because the vast majority of people with hearing impairments of deaf people are born to hearing parents. And most hearing parents, you know, they're not members of capital D Deaf culture.

Ellie: 48:44

Well, and you can have, you can have parents who don't hear, and children who do, like in the, the case of CODA that the movie came out, and this is part of Deaf culture too, right? The children of deaf adults.

David: 48:55

Yes, and that raises some about hearing people in Deaf culture. But in that we would say that those people are born into Deaf culture. But the other way around is the inverse. People are deaf are not members of Deaf culture. So they do have to go out find it on their own, usually when they're already adults. Although ideally before that.

Ellie: 49:17

Yeah, and I think another way that we think about culture is in terms of shared experience, especially when that shared experience gets organized into habits and practices that are communal. And so those who are deaf have shared experiences of living in a world that has been built for the hearing. And these sets of shared experiences also give rise to cultural formations. So I saw a, production of Oedipus from Deaf West Theater, which is this awesome theater company, I've been going to see their shows since I was a kid, that is comprised of some deaf actors and some hearing actors. And these productions tends to attract both a lot of people who are, you know, part of the Deaf community and people outside of it, such as myself. And the ways that they organize the theatrical performances are so fascinating. Like for instance, they'll have hearing actors who at certain times will speak, but at other times will sign and there will be subtitles up above. For those who don't, who don't ASL.

David: 50:21

Mm. Mm-hmm.

Ellie: 50:22

And then there will be deaf actors who will sometimes like utter a noise or say certain words or phrases, but then at other points sign, sometimes they'll even have deaf actors and hearing actors paired one another. And so the hearing actor will be speaking while the deaf actor is signing or gesturing. And I think what you really see in the Deaf West production, such as this production of Oedipus, is that it doesn't feel like you are seeing a performance that is compensating for the fact that some of the actors and audience members have a quote, lack to go back to that absence model you talked about before, David. It really is this full and positive theatrical performance that is different in kind from the kind of performance that you would have of Oedipus it were being done, you know, in a more standard way that wasn't through this Deaf West production. And there's a whole set of possibilities, emotional possibilities, possibilities of interpretation that open up by virtue of the particular structure of the Deaf West productions.

David: 51:19

Yeah, and I, I'm not familiar with this production company, but I suspect this could be an example of what Sparrow means when he says that Deaf culture is a culture to a large extent because they have not just a language, but also shared institutions and shared cultural practices.

Ellie: 51:37

Totally. That was kind of where I started with this.

David: 51:40

And so let me share a quote here because I think it neatly encapsulates all of this. And just to keep things in perspective, Sparrow ultimately wants to say that the Deaf community is not a subculture in the same way that like hippies are a subculture of American culture, he wants to say that they are a standalone culture. They are a cultural unit. And so has the following to say. He writes, unlike subcultures or even some ethnic cultures, Deaf people possess their own distinct languages, with a unique vocabulary in grammar. Deaf people also have a shared set of experiences relating to the consequences of deafness in a hearing culture, a shared history, and a distinct set of institutions. They have their own schools, clubs, meeting places, and even sporting competitions. The combination of the possession of a language and a set of institutions makes the claim of Deaf culture a particularly strong one.

Ellie: 52:45

And I'm struck by the end of that quote, David, where Sparrow says, the claim of Deaf culture is a particularly strong one. And so this suggests that there is a motivating force behind his piece, which is to right, make the claim deaf culture is a culture. I think when we think about it that way, we can imagine what it might look like if Deaf culture were recognized more as such within the I don't want to say broader culture that we live in, because that's going to risk the idea of subculture that you just, uh, is, is the wrong way of thinking about it. But maybe a, a kind of imbrication of cultures or an honoring of cultures within cultures without saying that they're subcultures. I think when one sees what a rich life Deaf people have, when society is organized with them in mind, whether it's through these schools, meeting places, sporting competitions, theatrical performances, a very different picture of deafness itself emerges. We don't see it as a gap or an absence of hearing, but rather as a mode of being.

David: 53:55

Yeah. And you know, even beyond that, it's not just that, it's a mode of being that it's not a lack. It might be a motive being that it's actually a gain.

Ellie: 54:06

Mm. Yeah.

David: 54:06

Like benefit or plus, and there is a concept in critical disability studies called disability gain, which is about personal and collective benefits that come with certain so-called disabilities. For instance, in the case of hearing, there is really exciting research showing that some of the gains of being deaf tied to cognition and the use of ASL as one's mother tongue.

Ellie: 54:35

Okay.

David: 54:35

One of the things about ASL is that of course it relies on the visualization of symbols through bodily movement right? That's what we call signing and having a native mastery of ASL has been linked to improved mental abilities, to being faster at generating mental images, to performing objectively better on tests related to mental rotation skills. You know, those, those, um, tests where they show you a really complicated asteroid looking shape, and have to guess what it would look like from the other side. People who are born into deaf culture and who speak ASL as their mother tongue do significantly better at those kinds of tasks perform really, really well and better than their hearing counterparts at facial recognition skills and spatial cognition tests. So here we see a lot of benefit.

Ellie: 55:34

You can see that because if your way of communicating builds concepts through movement and motoric visualization, I can imagine that you think about those concepts as more inherently dynamic than someone who associates concepts with a static word or a sound.

David: 55:50

Yeah, and read this article that used a specific word for this power of ASL and the authors used the term metaphoric iconicity about the the prowess of ASL. Basically the idea is that when you are a native ASL speaker or somebody who masters it, you know, like native, you enact metaphors and concepts through movement and therefore you visualize them more. That's what we've talking about. The, the authors of this piece made the additional argument that culturally, this might be really important for us as we move into new forms of technology and new forms of communication in the 21st century. Because as we see the rise of mixed visual media, largely because of the internet and because of globalization, those of us who don't communicate with ASL might benefit from learning to think ASL communicators because that will allow us to deal with the visual dimensions of 21st century communication and textuality a lot better than than our spoken languages allow us to.

Ellie: 57:08

Okay. Which, I mean, that does raise questions for me about the reliance in our culture on vision, and as we've talked about in our episode on vision, there are reasons for that. There are reasons why vision is in a sense the most focused on of the senses because it has such a large portion of the brain is devoted to it. But at the same time, I think we also raise some worries there and in other episodes about the emphasis on vision over and against other senses. And so I could see a, a way that what we're talking about would further the overreliance on vision that our culture has from a metaphorical or value laden perspective. Right. I think there's a sense in which our culture already is so image based.

David: 57:57

Mm-hmm.

Ellie: 57:57

And that's not to dispute the, the claims of deaf gain that you're talking about at all, David. It's just to, to show that they can be, or I worry that they can be a little bit co-opted by a culture that is so hyper reliant on the visual.

David: 58:12

So if I were to put on the hat of the authors of this article on metaphoric iconicity, I think what they say is the difference is that maybe our mainstream visual culture tends to be relatively static. Whereas what is important about ASL, epistemology, and cognition is that movement and dynamism is built into it. So it has this cinematic quality to it where are enacting ideas moreso than just looking at them. So it requires interpretation and performance.

Ellie: 58:46

So in that sense, this Deaf cultural gain is actually encouraging us to rethink not only hearing, but also vision.

David: 58:57

We hope you enjoy today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 59:05

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David: 59:10

To reach out to us and find episode info, go to overthinkpodcast.com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram @overthink_pod

Ellie: 59:20

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Clare A'Hearn, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music.

David: 59:27

And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.