I am fascinated by the life of Helen Keller and don't understand how she could learn, communicate, and be productive as both a blind and deaf person. I've had two experiences when I tried to navigate and eat like a blind person. The first was in Fort Worth. the second in Sarasota.
The old Texas & Pacific Railroad Warehouse, an eight story building in downtown Fort Worth, is 600 feet long by 100 feet wide. Only two companies occupied a small portion of the building when I worked there. My job was to monitor the pulse of the building, to keep it alive by maintaining and servicing its essential equipment.
City water pressure is insufficient for water to reach the upper floors of a tall building. I had to open a valve to fill the cistern in the sub-basement, then turn on a pump to fill the large holding tanks on the roof. The force of gravity in the tanks provided water for the building. The automatic pump in the cistern was broken, so I checked the water level every few days and turned on the pump as needed. The building had an office section with the bulk of the building divided into sections for warehousing and manufacturing. I had an apartment in the office section on one end of the building. The cistern was in the sub-basement on the other end.
One night, I walked the length of the dark building to check the water level in the cistern and noticed a muffling in sound as I approached a wall or walked through a passageway from one section to another. I shut my eyes to determine if I could “see” with my ears. After all, the floor space appeared to be empty, and I could hear walls as I approached them. I got through one section successfully. The eye opener on my journey was an empty pallet on the floor that I tripped over. So much for my personal discovery of what I thought was echolocation.
One summer in high school, I was a counselor at a camp for disabled children. I gave the Moses boys, who were both blind, a ride one afternoon, and they invited me to tour their home. They parked their canes at the door and moved about the house like sighted children. They would have laughed at my attempt to walk the equivalent of two city blocks with my eyes shut without a cane. Some blind people develop the ability to use real echolocation to navigate outside by making clicking sounds, similar to the way bats use sonar.
Another time, a friend asked if I thought that I could identify foods by taste alone. I didn't know, so I wore a blindfold as she prepared dessert and fed it to me. My first bite was a strawberry, then a blueberry, a piece of shortcake, and whipped cream. I couldn't identify any of them.
Scientific American Magazine describes the different senses involved in what we call “taste.”
Although sight is not technically part of taste, it certainly influences perception. Interestingly, food and drink are identified predominantly by the senses of smell and sight, not taste. Food can be identified by sight alone—we don't have to eat a strawberry to know it is a strawberry. The same goes for smell, in many cases.
To our brains, “taste” is actually a fusion of a food's taste, smell and touch into a single sensation. This combination of qualities takes place because during chewing or sipping, all sensory information originates from a common location: whatever it is we're snacking on. Further, “flavor” is a more accurate term for what we commonly refer to as taste; therefore, smell not only influences but is an integral part of flavor.
Pure taste sensations include sweet, sour, salty, bitter, savory and possibly, fat. Cells that recognize these flavors reside in taste buds located on the tongue and the roof of the mouth. When food and drink are placed in the mouth, taste cells are activated, and we perceive a flavor. Concurrently, whatever we are eating or sipping invariably contacts and activates sensory cells, located side-by-side with the taste cells, that allow us to perceive qualities such as temperature, spiciness or creaminess. We perceive the act of touch as tasting because the contact “captures” the flavor sensation.
Smells also seem to come from the mouth, even though there are no cells there responsible for detecting scents. Instead the sensation of strawberry, for example, depends upon activation of smell cells located at the end of the nasal passage. The information gathered by these cells is relayed to the mouth via a process called olfactory referral.
Attribution: The Senses Involved In Taste - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-how-does-sight-smell-affect-taste/
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