Viswanathan K's Thoughts

When the adoption agency showed us our 4-month daughter-to-be, we were asked to take the baby for a medical checkup. This will sound silly, but back then, I was worried if the baby was, er, deaf. I guess the way I asked the question to the doctor, the intent didn’t come out clearly. She misunderstood it as a crazy parent asking whether the baby had any special hearing capabilities, something that might indicate a musical career! She gave me a mouthful about how such things cannot be identified in babies, how they acquire skills as they grow up (you get the gist).   So I had to get creative. When we came back to the car, and my wife and the baby had gotten into it, I banged the car door hard. Intentionally. The baby visibly flinched – my question had been answered: she could hear, she wasn’t deaf.   It was only later that I realized that children may hear but they never listen. Many attributes of children improve as they grow older. But not the listen-to-parents faculty...

The sense of hearing has some advantages over every other sense, explains Ed Yong in Immense World . Unlike touch, hearing can operate over distances. Unlike vision, it can operate in darkness and through objects. Unlike surface vibrations, it can operate in air and water. Unlike smell, which needs time for the molecules to disperse, sound is very quick. No wonder then that some animals make so much use of hearing.   But sound has a major disadvantage – interference by other sounds. The noise of the bird’s own wings flapping, for example. The owl has solved this problem by making its own flapping almost impossibly quiet or more accurately, the sound its wings make are at a frequency that neither the owl nor its prey can hear.   Some sense organs seem symmetrically placed in all animals. Like ears. Not always. A drawback of symmetrical ears (like ours) is that if a sound hits both ears simultaneously, then the animal cannot make out if it came from above or below. That’...