“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.
