As the Christmas pantomime season gets into full swing, I feel that I may have found an exciting new career. My defective sound locating faculties ensure that every group discussion hosted by me is accompanied by embarrassing shouts from the audience of “They’re behind you!”, “They’re over there!” and the even more embarrassing “They’re right in front of you!” every time someone speaks. At the sight of my frantic head rotations, passing strangers could be forgiven for thinking that there was a faulty pair of eyes in charge of the proceedings, rather than a faulty pair of ears.
It would seem that the hearing aid causes my brain to tell me that every distant sound emanates from my left ear canal. Whilst I know that, to the best of my knowledge, there are no students in my left ear canal, my head still insists on turning there first anyway, when taken by surprise. The necessary cognitive manual over-ride of this reflex takes valuable milliseconds, which allows just enough time to completely miss the question and for impatient audience heckling to start.
Still, I may have a glittering future as a groundbreaking Method acting pantomime dame ahead of me.
Hi, it sounds like you’re having some fun with your students (or they’re having fun with you?)
I really can’t tell direction either, I think there must be plenty of us around who have to struggle with this!
Nice blog btw 🙂
Hi pdpgpg, I fear that the students will remember me much less for my incisive intellectual abilities than for my car-crash group discussions. I’d never given a second thought to the wonders of binaural sound location before, but I’m certainly paying a bit more attention on the roads than I used to!
Looking forward to the next instalments on your blog 🙂