If you had to give up one of your senses, which one and why?

I was listening to a podcast recently and one of the questions that briefly touched on was which of the senses you would give up if you had to.

According to https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superpowers-for-the-blind-and-deaf/ if one of the senses is withdrawn e.g. someone who had sight goes blind, the brain doesn’t just learn to use the other senses better, but actually adapts and by rewiring and processes the other senses differently. A study they cite showed people born deaf use areas of the brain typically used to process sound to process touch and vision instead. This phenomenon is call cross-modal neuroplasticity. For those who lose their sight it seems the visual cortex is taken over by other senses such as sound and touch to help process language. About 285 million people are visually impaired by other senses usually compensate.

What if we woke up one day without a sense of taste? Some people have experienced this as a symptom of Covid, and when we get colds or flu we often loose our sense of taste. Our sense of taste is closely linked to smell with about 80% of our taste sensation provided by the sense of smell, so maybe that’s not such a bad sense to lose.

If we lost the sense of smell we wouldn’t be able to taste food, but would also not be able to smell things that are dangerous, like a gas leak or fire, or a food stuff gone off.

Can we truly lose the sense of touch? According to https://insh.world/science/what-if-we-lost-our-senses-one-after-the-other/ we start to lose touch sense as we get older but nerve damage or medical conditions can contribute. If we lost this sense we wouldn’t be able to feel the touch of a loved one, or have any sense of harming our body, but it would also mean that we wouldn’t be able to walk properly without a sense of touching the ground.

What if you lost all senses? Total sensory deprivation would cause hallucinations so it would be like forever being in a dream state and have a detrimental impact on psychological health.

As a bell ringer, losing hearing would be difficult, but not impossible as we can use the visual clues of where to place the bell. There are blind ringers who have a “sense” of where the rope falls and when to catch it. If bell ringers lost touch it would make physically ringing a bell difficult as we all worry, particularly when we first learn to ring, about letting go of the tail end. Losing a sense of taste wouldn’t be an issue, and losing the sense of smell may be beneficial in some places where there is inadequate ventilation!

I think of all the sense to lose taste is probably the easiest one to live with if I had to, although I do like food. What about you?

Broadening musical horizons

Sunday evening I really enjoyed watching a compilation programme on BBC1 of highlights from stage musicals, Musicals: The Greatest Show, which was immediately followed by the O2 staged 25^th anniversary production of Les Miserables, a show that we’ve seen in the West End, and one of the few that I have the soundtrack for downloaded on my music player.

Cast members from several West End shows like Wicked, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, Hairspray, Six and others, sang iconic songs from the shows. And I knew the words to pretty much all of them. We’ve had a family tradition for many years now of going to see a West End show during the Christmas period, so have seen a fair few of the offerings.

I do like a good belter of a song, or one that is really catchy and sing-a-long-able. Even if I don’t know the words, I know the tune and was humming, whistling or making some random noises along to (probably to the annoyance of C). There were some spectacular performances that really got the hair on the back of your neck standing up.

The Les Miserables performance was exceptional. They’d make some adjustments to the performance to account for it being at the O2, but nothing of the drama was lost. At the end they had all 4 performers who had played Jean Val Jean singing together, which was actually pretty awesome. To be honest, I can’t remember which one of them played him when we went to see it, without digging the programme out, it was a few years ago now.

The last musical we went to see was Six, the stories of Henry VIII’s wives, factually correct but with a bit of a modern spin on the delivery. It was more like going to a rock concert than a theatre show, especially at the end when they encouraged everyone to get up on the their feet and dance, and get their phones out to record it.

We really have missed out on some spectacular theatre over this last year but I’m pleased that shows like the Musicals: The Greatest Show may have reached a new audience and enthused more of us to partake when we are able.

We do currently have tickets for Sister Act in August, featuring Whoopi Goldberg and Jennifer Saunders, which was postponed from last year, so fingers cross that goes ahead. I will look forward to visiting the West End again and having a good old sing along.

Ding 1 and Ding 2

C and I having been ringing just 2 bells at the Cathedral on a Sunday morning now for exactly 4 months. Prior to that we could ring in 2 groups so long as we were socially distanced, but since the last increase in Tiers and lockdowns, we had to reduce it to just the 2 of us.

We’ve got ourselves into a very good routine by ringing 1 and 2, then make places and back, then 3 dodges, then 3 places again, and we just keep doing that. This means that you end up alternating dodging at handstrokes and backstrokes. It’s a good handling practice, but its surprising easy to lose count up to 3!

Each week I’ve been taking a video and uploading it to our #bellringing social media so my friends can see that we’re still alive and doing something. There are those who would ordinarily be ringing with us but can’t at the moment. The majority of towers still aren’t ringing at all, so we’re lucky that the 2 of us can at least do something. It seems to be well appreciated by the Cathedral, and we’ve had some comments from the public on our social media sites saying that they miss the sound of the bells, or that they heard us ringing our 2 bells.

We ring in short 5 or so minute bursts between about 10am and 10.30am, immediately prior to the morning service that is live streamed on the Cathedral’s social media. I don’t think that any of our ringing has featured at all, as we’ve generally finished and wound our way down the spiral stairs just as the service starts. We hope that the local community find some solace in the hearing of the bells and that the church is still “open”.

We will continue to do our bit as long we as are able, and we wait patiently for when the time comes that we are able to welcome our bellringing colleagues back and we can ring on more bells and make a joyful sound.

Surround sound

How often do we get an opportunity to just sit and listen, I mean REALLY listen to the sounds around us?

Both C and I were sat out our respective desks in the study, going about our business when it suddenly hit my ears there there was silence. Neither of us were speaking. At the time neither of us was hammering our keyboards or frantically clicking a mouse. But then I noticed the non-silence which actually became quite loud.

I could hear the birds twittering in the back garden, as clear as a bell. The hum from the fan on C’s PC, continual hum. The wall clock ticking, so loudly too that it beggers belief that sometimes you barely notice it at all. There was an occasional mouse click as one or other of us scrolled up whatever it was we were reading on the screen. There was a throat clearing after a glug of water. There was a chair squeaking under the pressure of shifting weight. There was an airplane outside on its way to, or from, who knows where. There was pen scratching on paper as I was making notes. There was a belly rumble and an over emphasised exhalation.

Within the space of somewhere between 5 to 10 minutes there were all these sounds surrounding me, but there was silence. Peaceful, gratifying, restorative. All of these amazing sounds that I might have missed had the radio in the kitchen been on, or had I been hammering away at documents or emails, or people talking.

Silence can provide us with so many benefits if we choose to allow them into our lives.

It can allow us to concentrate and focus, which apparently can be lost if the sound is over 80 decibels. Obviously the writer of that point has never been to a #bellringing practice where concentration is required despite the noise of the bells.

It can allow our minds to be more creative. Some eminent scientists did their best creative work after a period of solitude and quietness.

It can allow us to discover how we may improve our lives when attention is given to self awareness practices. Taking time to self reflect can help figure out what and where we want to be.

It can help relax us and reduce stress levels if we allow a period of silence.

It can affect our ability to learn. The more noise we are exposed to the worse we perform and find it harder to concentrate.

Doing nothing and remaining silent can increase productivity of new brain cells, which in turn supports greater productivity as much as tenfold.

Silence can help cultivate calmness and peacefulness when you regularly practice silence and patience.

If you are able to, I invite you to sit somewhere comfortable and just be silent for even just a few moments. Make a note of all the things that you can hear in the silence. You’ll be surprised how much surround sound there is.