Communication network update series nr 9

Imagine yourself in a dark room – no light at all stimulates your visual sense. Add a silence so deep that not even the sounds of your own body flicker the small receptive hairs in your cochlea. Then imagine that you have no language, no inner monologue to keep your mind on track with sanity.

Now, from no perceivable place somewhere in this darkness and silence, strange things occur as if by magic, something touches you –briefly or lingering – only to disappear again into utter nothingness. Only the traces of remembered touch are left on your body and in your mind. This is the world of congenitally deafblind children, as one might imagine it to be.

M.A. thesis in Cognitive Semiotics
Center for Semiotics, University of Aarhus 2003