Blog Article/Post Caveat (Read First Please: Click the Link)
What is it? Well, "Sensory integration is the process by which we receive information through our senses, organize this information, and use it to participate in everyday activities. SI is the process through which we sense the world around us. We use our sensory organs to receive information and, on a higher level, we organize it so we understand our surroundings and respond appropriately." - Google Definitions
How did I come up with this subject? Through my research on both vertigo and hearing loss. The two, apparently, go together like peas and carrots - mostly. Why is this important to self-protection? Because my friends we seem to focus on a conscious level on the sense of sight for most things and provide credit to our hearing peripherally on both a conscious and unconscious level.
Our various awareness skills do rely on all of our sensory signals be they sight or sound or touch or taste or smell. Our brains use all our senses on an unconscious instinct-like method to organize and participate and perceive the world around us and if you stop and think that means "our awareness such as situational" we rely on to avoid, deescalate and act in self-protection for self-defense.
Hearing plays a role, a very critical role, in all of this as anyone who loses their hearing can attest - like me. I was diagnosed with a hearing anomaly when I retired from my civil service under the Department of the Navy banner, i.e., GS-11 Physical Security Specialist/Officer for a Navy Ammo Storage facility. Apparently, as I am learning now, my hearing loss was assimilative spanning the time, decades, when I entered the military. Military persons leading disability is hearing loss with tinnitus and in my case vertigo.
The following are some extracts from published research on the loss of hearing, deafness if you will because in defining it, it is deafness. Here are the quotes:
"Our normal healthy hearing system allows us to hear a multitude of subtle differences in sound (one aspect to hearing loss is even when hearing someone talk you can still NOT HEAR certain sounds such as the vowel sounds in words), normal hearing screens out background noise (hearing loss means that capability is pretty much gone), and normal hearing allows the ears to shut down when things get loud (and that too is crippled in hearing loss). So, hearing aids are not a substitute for the real thing but they help and to conserve your hearing they assist as long as you start to protect your ears, what’s left of them, by suppressing loud sounds, etc."
For us, in our skills to remain aware of threats, the key words to look at are “subtle differences in sound” and as you can determine by reading these excerpts our ability to detect those things that would trigger our spidey sense, the ones that trigger that gut feeling of something not right, literally disappear altogether out there in this busy and VERY LOUD world. Add in all the distractions and our abilities as hearing impaired escalate to very dangerous levels.
“Hearing is critical and more so that even seeing, it is important in that it establishes one’s sense of place, it anchors you in the world and it puts you at the center of a multidimensional universe. We rely on hearing what is behind us, above us; we hear our stomachs rumble and our heat beat; we hear in the dark; we hear in a cave or a windowless cell; we hear in our sleep; we can hear even in a coma; babies hear in the womb; we hear as we breathe - effortlessly - UNTIL WE CAN’T!”
The second extract supports and validates what I am trying to convey here to us in the karate and martial disciplines who focus on and teach self-protection for self-defense. All those examples above tend to disappear when one’s hearing becomes impaired. It must be noted that even with aids the problem does NOT diminish all that much when it comes to the dangers herein through self-protection for self-defense. One such danger is how we can misinterpret sounds so our spidey senses may either trigger it more often or may miss it altogether dependent on that sound followed by our tendency to hear something and we turn instinctively toward said sound that may be obvious such as a gun shot or not so obvious such as a scraping sound of a possible force enhancing weapon behind you.
For instance: “In noisy places - dinner parties, the street, restaurants, the lobby of a theater, a waiting room with any noise be it radio, music or television, a meeting, a room with a noisy device like AC - the hearing impaired cannot pick up even the expected.”
Consider how the brain may malfunction when sound is down or turned off or missing sound altogether then consider how that brain may integrate and interpret things with a significant part of the data or information suddenly is missing?
Let me put it this way, think of it as “built in permanent auditory EXCLUSION!” As you can imagine, when stressed and hit with the chemical dump in an attack we suffer such things in many or all of our senses and that is bad so now imagine even how bad it can be if you have it without stresses and the adrenaline hit then suddenly by surprise you are attacked, wow!
Now, you would think it is easy to protect the ears so we don’t have to deal with this and you would be correct, protection against loud noises is a big one. If you use power tools - use hearing protection. Hearing protection is a biggy and not submitting to loud noises over time goes a long way as well - this is something to be researched because unless you take the steps, you will end up deaf.
Maximize your awareness skills by ensuring all of your sensory systems are up, on line and fully functional because if one link is weak and you have not adjusted accordingly then you allow yourself to become more vulnerable overall.
Contemplate this…
For reference and sources and professionals go here: Bibliography (Click the link)
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