Mixing up my senses: looking closer to hear more

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

I was on a plane, watching a movie on my iPhone. Forgot my own earbuds, so I had to use the (crappy) headphones the airline supplied. Which, as it turned out, were not powerful enough for me to clearly hear the movie dialogue and then I - the product millions of years of evolution - did the following: I held the iPhone closer, apparently thinking that this would enable to hear the movie dialogue better. Sigh. A split second after doing this I became conscious of the utter uselessness of my act, and found myself looking around stealthily to see whether someone had witnessed the temporary mix up of my senses.

[Photo: Riggle]

2 reactions:

miss dipsy said...: The "millions of years of evolution" comment actually makes perfect sense of this behaviour! Over our millions of years of evolution, we have only ever interacted with objects that obey simple laws of nature; if something makes a sound, the sound will come out of the object itself, not out of some pieces of plastic attached to the object by cords. So the obvious way to deal with something being too quiet is to move closer to it, as far as our instinctive mind is concerned. We tend to act on "instinct" an awful lot of the time; our rational mind isn't usually quite as fast, so we do a lot of things on impulse that seem irrational, but make perfect sense from an evolutionary point of view.; 12:09 PM
Jasper (uselog.com) said...: That's what me and my poor writing skills were actually trying to point out: that evolution has left us with a skill set that's not always suitable with today's products.; 5:08 AM