Tinnitus, a high-pitched tone, seems louder in recent years. Diplopia, inability to fuse images from the two eyes, has become noteworthy during the past several months after I got reading glasses. What's next?

Walking home yesterday, tiny epiphany: what if I've always had double vision and ringing in my ears, and only recently noticed? After all, each eye is always sending an image to the brain; maybe one of them has been ignored for decades? Nerves in the inner ear are always picking up auditory data; maybe I just haven't been paying attention?

Which raises some fascinating possibilities:

• Could an old brain learn to process incoming information differently, be reprogrammed to shift two images to match, discover how to renormalize sounds so a constant noise is notch-filtered out?
• What other senses could expand by better downstream signal processing?
  • feel the pressure of earth holding up the feet, the tickle of cloth in garments, the kiss of air around the body (Taiji-like "Swimming in Air") ...
  • taste the buds on the tongue ...
  • smell the aromas inside the nose ...
  • monitor thoughts racing through the mind ...

It's the David Foster Wallace parable "This Is Water":

... There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

^z - 2014-07-10