Speechification

Here’s a contribution very kindly sent to us by Mr Dan Hill:

ABC Radio National’s annual Boyer Lectures has been running for over 40 years now, and are essentially the Aussie equivalent of the BBC’s Reith Lectures. So the format is a respected public thinker given free rein to discuss ‘Big Ideas’, across a wide range social, scientific or cultural issues. Last year’s saw the former Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia explain macro-economics and the notion of stability. Lest that seem a little dry, the great writers Peter Conrad (2004) and David Malouf (1998) previously contributed two brilliant series on the Australian identity, for instance. And I’d pay good money to hear architect Robin Boyd’s 1967 series on ‘Artificial Australia’ dug out of the archives.

This year sees Professor Graeme Clark present a series on ‘Restoring The Senses’, which he describes as: “highlighting the importance of our senses, and how they can be restored with bionics.” Forget Steve Austin for a moment, for Clark was a key figure in the inventor of the actual bionic ear, and then the new field of ‘Medical Bionics’, which aims to develop bionic eyes too, as well as spinal cords and nerve systems for touch and movement.

In his first lecture, and perhaps given the almost unimaginable capabilities of the human sensory system, Professor Clark feels the need to frame what follows via a quick circuit of the complex history of entwined relationships between science and theology. He eventually makes his own position clear - a preference for a supernatural creator - and while I can’t personally reconcile that with science, it’s still an interesting set-up.

But moving on from the spirit world, the real joy of this is in hearing the charmingly avuncular Prof Clark talk about the incredible range of delicacy within the senses. It’s a subject I find fascinating, and particularly when he touches (o-ho) on the non-visual senses. It’s chock full of great factoids, like “the number of possible activation states of the brain is greater than the number of atoms in the universe”, or “the softest sound that we can hear moves the ear drum 1 billionth of one millimetre, or one-twentieth the size of a water molecule.” Learning that the eye can respond to a range of intensities from one to a mere 10 billion, compared to the one to one trillion for hearing, it It backs up my own belief that vision is overplayed today, in the league table of the senses. Check out the unheralded importance of the thumb too.

There’s way more he could go into here - further reading in Juhani Pallasmaa’s ‘The Eyes of the Skin’, Joy Monice Malnar & Frank Vodvarka’s ‘Sensory Design’ or Mirko Zardini’s ‘Sense of the City’ - and so far he doesn’t seem to be addressing contemporary research suggesting there are actually 17 senses. He’s only got 6 lectures to play with, after all. But we’ll see. Or hear, rather.

The MP3’s here.