Try it yourself at the next family meeting: blindfold your partner and ask everyone to silently shake hands with him, then find out if he can recognize you.
Quite often a person that has been blind-folded looses the perception of who is who if she can’t hear the other’s voices. This means that we are using mainly two senses: the sight and the hearing. The taste and the smell are still functioning, although the taste is a bit clumsy. And we have the touch left, all along the body skin, because not only our hands can feel other skins and textures. In spite of this enormous capacity, we are not trained to use our skin as a main method of perception -as we know we don’t fully use our brains or lungs-. The discovery of this inability is a surprise, expressed often with laughter.
The 7th of May 2017 we invited friends to have lunch with us. Half of the group didn’t know the other half, three children were present, we were nine in total. After the coffee, we decided to play Lost Sense in the garden. It was a nice spring day. As soon as we started everybody felt silent, it was a turning point because during the lunch -that served for introducing each other- there was active loud talk. They laughed silently -which is not easy, you are challenged to find new ways to share the joy-.
We played for more than 2 hours. The 7 and 11 year olds guessed better than the others -both recognized their mother-, but the 14 year old didn’t. The two couples, surprised, didn’t recognize their partners. When we explained them that they touched their partner hands or cheeks, they had to accept that their hands were not trained to perceive. The comments were coincident :they felt lost when blindfolded and they realized that their perceptions were mostly eyes and ears centered. We discussed about this paradox, concluding that the older we get the less we are capable of sensing others through our skin. Does a baby know if the mother or the father is holding her when she still can’t see?
Kim, 35: “it was so unexpected, I really lost the notion of who was who, and what was going on”
Nico, 7: “Mom didn’t recognize me!”
Pol, 11: “What a game, my parents didn’t guess each other and I laughed so hard I had to swap positions with Alba“
Alba
, 14: “I didn’t believe the others when they were saying that it feels so different when you are blindfoded, and when I had to it happended to me! unbeliavable”