‘The pictures are better on the radio’

Bonnie M Miller

Listening to Touching the Elephant by Rockethouse Productions is an interesting insight into the ways blind people learn, describe and relate what they sense to other things they have sensed. One of the blind participants describes how she believes she has no concept of looking because she can’t put an image to something in her head if she has never seen it before. As this is the case, how would blind people imagine something they haven’t seen before? Blind people perceive the world from a completely different perspective, relating everything to touch and sound. For instance the same lady describes the colour red akin to a velvet sensation. As sighted people we often overlook things, having more senses means they are more blunt as we don’t have to rely on one to do the job of another. Listening to the radio focuses in only on our ears, allowing us to key in on the more minute details, the background noise, we may miss as sighted people that blind people learn to appreciate. I believe the nature of radio listening is more descriptive, it’s about painting an image in the listener’s head sentence by sentence and sound by sound at a time, just like blind people do on a daily basis through their lives.