LAUSR

Our five core senses are portals to experience and engage the world around us. Our eyes and ears are complex organs with special structures and receptors designed for specific stimuli. For accurate vision and hearing, our bodies must be able to receive, interpret, and derive meaning from a constant stream of sights and sounds, light and noise, day and night. While hearing and vision are uniquely central for most of us to interpret and respond to the world, all of our senses collaborate to enable us to better understand our surroundings. Yet even though our senses are at the center of how we understand the world around us, there is still much we don't know. Exploring how our senses work together and impact our experiences was explored in a recent TED Radio Hour series, The Five Senses. Talks and interviews on touch, taste, and smell were fascinating, teasing what I knew and didn't. Touch, taste, and smell offer accessibility to a wider world than I had imagined. The interviews and talks on hearing and vision, though, were lessons in lost and found. I learned how the blind see and the deaf hear. A speaker found vision only after he lost his sight. Another learned to listen only after losing her hearing. It was the stuff of insight, inspiration, and poetry. This issue of the journal is also full of insight and inspiration, exploring issues of screening, detecting, and preserving. In the case of vision and hearing, losses often occur gradually…