Evolution

Evolution / Signed language — 7 Comments
23
Jul 11

Kim’s Game and the Kinaesthetic Thinker

real/image

“Deaf people are people of the eye.”

“Deaf people see things differently.”

“Deaf people can see more.”

The experiment on peripheral vision was used as an indicator that Deaf people better utilised their sight compared to non-deaf people. I am still left scratching my head. You know why? My peripheral vision is just rubbish. Rather than denounce the whole idea, I find myself wanted to understand it better.

I find myself pondering about Neil Flemming and the VAK model (later VARK). Flemming identified three types of thinkers: visual, auditory and kinaesthetic. He later added ‘reading’ for people who think in ‘text’. While people can think differently, they also learn different. So the VAK model can influence teaching and learning practice, ie. to operate in the visual, auditory or kinaesthetic domain. You can find a lot of evidence in the English language, such as: I see what you mean, I hear what you are saying, and I get the gist of what you mean. Essentially, they all mean the same thing but expressed in different ways, depending on how one thinks. Depending on which characteristics one exhibits, you can observe if a person is a visual thinker, or not.

Are Deaf people visual thinkers? It would involve someone who can think in pictures or film. Someone who can recall images again in their minds. They can create images of how things will look before they are made. They are the observers, the people who sit in the street-side cafes and watch the world go by, and they catch the smallest details. They can abstract ideas from what is seen. They can interpret reality into something that can be perceived different to invoke a reaction, like impressionism and cubism.

I find it difficult to imagine that all Deaf people are visual thinkers. I remember an exercise I used as a trainer, regular, over a period of 8 years. It was called Kim’s Game. 30 different everyday objects are placed on a table in another room. A group of four people are instructed that they will see around 30 objects on a table and, as a team, remember as many objects as they can. They are not allowed to communicate whilst in the room and objects can only be viewed for 30 seconds. The group would organise themselves to look at different parts of the table and work together to remember as many as they can.

I do not recall that Deaf people were better at this ‘game’ than non-deaf people. In fact their scores are very similar. If Deaf people were truly visual thinkers, they should excel in this test. But they don’t. Why don’t they?

There is another type of thinker that might be an alternative option: the kinaesthetic thinker. It is where a person operates in the feeling domain. The thinker is more tactile, using movement and touch to express their feelings. Kinaesthetic thinkers express through doing, touching, feeling, moving.

When you think of a Deaf person expressing their ideas through their movement, you realise that signed languages are very well equipped to do this. The changes in rhythm, tempo or temperature can change how the same sign is expressed and its meaning. Our signed language poetry has it in abundance. The movements are collected into abstract ideas by the way of signs. Classic examples include classifiers and placements that create rules to bring the real or imagined space into the hands (or topographical space).

I would expect all people to be able to think in the visual, auditory or kinaesthetic modes but one will be adopted more favourably. Here is a simple idea that will help you to decide if you are a visual or kinaesthetic thinker. You are asked to describe a room in your house that you know well. Try to recall the room in as much detail as you can. When you have finished, think about what you have just said and decide whether you described the room as an observer looking at a picture or a film, in the observer position, or were you in the picture or film and moving about in the room referring to the things as they are laid out in front of you?

If you are the observer, then you are operating in the visual mode but if you are in the room, then you are operating in the kinaesthetic mode.

The idea of ‘kinaesthetic people’ reminds me of a previous blog I wrote on ‘sensorimotor’ stages of cognitive development (Piaget). The act of moving, sensing, feeling, emoting the space they are in. The movement can be real (moving in space) or abstracted (signing in topographical space). This coincides with ideas that signed languages are less iconic than we think, the sign for bird may look iconic to us as signed language users but they are not iconic to non-signed language users. Therefore, signed languages are an abstracted representation of what is real.

I am left thinking about a piece of poetry by Dot Miles. She used her hands to describe a tree by a lake in the sun; one hand to represent the tree and another to represent the reflection of the tree on the lake. But then she moved, her eyes switched from the observer of her creation to actually being there, looking at the tree and admiring the reflection in the rising sun. It was a classic Miles moment when she is there, feeling, emoting and living in her creations. She wasn’t creating pictures for you to see, she was creating worlds for you to sit in and feel, right in the palm of her hands.

Photo by Max Sparber
Community / Evolution — 10 Comments
7
Jul 11

Deaf People and The Cyborg

Cyborg

Donna Harroway challenged the essentialist feminist. It was common thinking that women have a different biology compared to men, therefore they are different. The relationship between women and men is expressed as a duality. Our current understanding of relationships between men and women, black and white, abled and disabled, and deaf and hearing creates a duality. The risk is that women would not exist without the presence of men in the same way as the identity of Deaf people would not exist without a ‘hearing identity’ (which doesn’t exist anyway). Harroway wanted to challenge the strict lines between us and them; she wanted to blur these lines.

Harroway used the metaphor of the cyborg. It is an imagined or socially formed concept that nature and machine are closely entwined. Our imagined representations of the cyborg include Seven of Nine in Star Trek or the Cybermen in Dr. Who, where the mechanics are embedded into the human being but they are still visible, or the Terminator and Human Cylons who are machines that are indistinguishable from human beings. The Six Million Dollar Man was a perfect amalgamation of the cyborg but resulted with various non-human abilities; a super-man.

We have an obvious reference to the cyborg in the world of deaf people, the cochlear implant. An electrode breaches the inner ear and places a technical rendition of sound directly to the auditory nerve; it replaces the function of the ear with a machine. But the imagery of this machine includes the embedded magnet that holds the addendum in place. As no other part of the body is magnetic, the implant brings a machine orientated ability to the human body; a small unnatural super-ability.

Harroway goes a step further to explore the relationship between man and machine. She describes how the boundaries between the two, the duality, has become blurred. We all live with machines everyday: a pair of glasses, an iPhone, and an aeroplane. Without these machines, a large percentage of the population would be unable to see, be unable to contact another person remotely and get information on the fly, or take days to travel to holiday destinations in Europe. We are all cyborgs. The boundaries between man and machine is blurred.

In turn, Harroway has challenged the essentialist description of feminism. Feminism is not about being a biological woman but the affinity between women. How feminism is described is based on that affinity. She challenged some feminists who rejected women who identify themselves as pornographic entertainers and they should convert to an ‘ideal’ feminist. Harroway accepted all levels of affinity to inform feminism, from the activist to the prostitute.

What does this mean for us, as a community of Deaf people. Do we need to come away from the essentialist description of the biological deaf person to justify the existence of a Deaf community? To come away from the duality of deaf and hearing, and focus on the affinity between Deaf people? There is no single image of a Deafist because the lines between Deaf and hearing are blurred. If there is affinity amongst deaf people, then that constitutes Deafism.

If you could allow me to play with the cyborg a little further, cyborgism has its own agenda. I caught an older gentleman in an electric wheelchair/scooter riding on the road. The purpose of the scooter was to allow older people, who are unable to walk very far, to travel like other people. In fact, the scooter is quite fast and the gentleman had his hand on the gas with a beaming grin. He got one up on the slower walkers and he was in the fast lane. Cyborgism has never been about making disabled people normal. It is about making disabled people super-people.

There will be a day when the fastest runner, the furthest jumper or the quickest team will not be found in the Olympics, but in the Paralympics. Disabled people will supersede the abilities of other athletes. It will result with three groups of people: the disabled who reject technology or unable to use it; the abled who have a standard set of abilities; and the super-abled, the intentional cyborgs (see Hallacy).

The Cyborg metaphor helps us to exist as a Deaf people without the need of the opposing ‘hearing people’, we exist because we are. As long as the affinity exists between us, the Deaf community exists. We need to come away from the myth that machine can replicate what is natural because humanity has higher ambitions or supernatural dreams, and they will come to life in the real-life cyborg.

Photo by Bohman
Evolution / Signed language — 1 Comment
19
Jun 11

Baby Signing and Piaget’s Evolution

Baby says 'hello'

I am here at the start of a new blog, there is a blank sheet in front of me that needs to be filled with ideas. I didn’t start this blog on a whim, something inspired me to write. I don’t want to start with the name of the blog or a justification of why this blog exists, it just does; accept it. It will become whatever it will become.

I want to start with Emma and Grace. Emma is a new Mum and she gave birth to Grace just 5 months ago. When Emma was heavily pregnant last year, I offered to provide BSL tuition for the office staff – Emma just loved it. To inspire her, I suggested the idea of ‘baby signs‘ and gave her a spiel of benefits. To be honest, baby signs are a bit of a fad. Learning a few signs for milk, sleep, eat, like, and don’t like are not going to turn children into little Einsteins. But there is an inspiration for a parent to communicate with a child before the development of speech. If anything helps a parent to watch and observe children’s attempt to communicate more closely, it can only be a good thing.

Before you run to the cliff and jump into the chasm of wild statements, I am not talking about deaf children; I want to talk about all children. The children who try to tell parents their needs, and when it fails, they cry, scream and throw a tantrum. We must accept that tantrums are just another form of communication, more alarming because of the urgency and because the previous attempts to communicate had failed.

Jean Piaget is someone who understands something about children, about their cognitive development. How a child develops their association with the world. It is Piaget who understood the terrible twos; when the child perceives a world that revolves around them. He also observed how this stage moves to another, to a stage of relationships and relating with members of the family and others. The child moves from ‘egocentric’ to ‘sociocentric’ stages in psychological development.

Piaget went further to describe how a child has four different stages of development: sensorimotor (putting objects in the mouth in order to sense them); preoperational (developing motor skills through magical thinking); concrete operational (using motor skills logically); and formal operational thinking (developing abstract thoughts). As you can see, the four stages moves through the ages of 0 to 16 onwards. The stages happen to us all, and it can’t be avoided.

Even further than that, the four stages are typical of evolutionary development of mankind. It was William Stokoe who made the link between signed language and evolution. The utilisation of objects, or tools, is something we can associate with human evolution, when early human beings used tools kill their hunt. The increased amount of protein in the early human’s diet, led to the next stage, and so forth.

Sign language is also a tool. It is a tool of communication and expression of ideas, a language. Stokoe expressed the idea that early human beings most probably used a signed language of some form, before the development of vocal chords and the brain’s ability to make complex sounds and recognise them.

This thinking reminds me of my nephew, Daniele. At just 6 months old, I saw his hands change from gently moving in the air to purposefully touching his face with small fists. I tried to imagine, what would that sensation represent; what is that big object that touches a baby’s face. I realised that it was most probably the most important object in his life, his mother’s breast. I warned his mother that Daniele was asking for a feed, but she did what every mother would do, ‘I’ll just wait until he starts crying.’ Lo and behold, just 30 seconds later; Daniele started screaming. Daniele’s hands, his tools for communication, was reaching out to the world, but no-one was watching.

As much as signed language was an important step in the evolution of human beings, signed language is also an important step in the cognitive development of children. It is in the sensorimotor period of development at the ages of 0 to 2 years old, when movement and senses are closely entwined. A parent needs to learn how to watch these movements and interpret them into expressions of needs and desires, and respond to them. A parent could learn how to express simple ideas in signed language and relate them to real objects, in the same way that a child assimilates objects through their mouth.

Baby signing has a danger of becoming a fad. But if we go back to our evolutionary roots to sign and watch, before the child can hear and speak, parents are playing a crucial part in their child’s development.