Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghusbands | Hacker News Reader

Blind people understand language perfectly well, which rules out your conjecture.

[ETA: Yes, this is a response to "see and hear", which should perhaps be "see or hear", and because "we mirror and model their muscle movements" implies more than just vocals/sound.]

View on HN

I must have expressed it poorly, because my conjecture seems to apply equally to blind people. Looking back, maybe it's because I wrote "see and hear"? Just an artifact of my perspective as a hard-of-hearing person who relies heavily on lipreading. I suspect when blind people hear speech, or read with braille, they mirror the muscle movements involved, as if they were speaking the words themselves. Sight isn't required for that. Neither is hearing. The deaf-blind can learn sign language through feeling the motion of the signs. I suspect it all works the same way, hearing language, seeing language, feeling language acted out physically - the audience understands it by acting out the same motions themselves, internally.

You’re able to capture a whole world of proximity relations through echolocation.

I assume you mean by auditory information. Echolocation pertains specifically to the use of echoes to determine location, which would not help at all in this case, with the granularity required.

Even assuming that auditory information it is, I am unsure if it enables mimicry as much as visual information, which apart from being our predominant sense, it gives clear clue as to which movement led to which action/sound

proprioception is separate from vision.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com