The Neuro-Letter #2

I have this fuzzy memory of sitting in a classroom, maybe in elementary or middle school, listening to a faceless teacher lecture about Helen Keller. At least, the class was probably about her as I don’t remember public school teaching me much about anyone else from the history of the blind. When the lesson was over, my classmates and I were invited to participate in an exercise that was supposed to “put us in the shoes” of someone living with a sight-related disability. (Move over deafness, right? Sorry, I know it’s tough. I will make it up to you later.)

Anyway, the exercise was simple. We took turns putting on a blindfold, and when the teacher was sure we couldn’t see anything, they would hand us a random object in the classroom and ask us to identify it using only our other senses. I think most of the kids treated it as a kind of guessing game, and in their defense, they probably didn’t put too much effort into deduction or thinking out-of-the-box. So naturally, no one answered correctly.

Then my turn came and I soon heard my classmates murmur “ooh” and whisper things like, “that’s hard” and “he’s not gonna get it.” And to be honest, for the first several seconds, the thing placed into my hands felt completely alien to me. I was powerless and confused.

I’m not sure whether it was out of curiosity, or out of a desire to prove others wrong, but I remember that I didn’t give up when the teacher offered to take the object back from me. However it was by sheer coincidence, then, that I flipped the thing over and touched something squishy like rubber. Totally unlike the rest of the object, which had the shape of a thin brick, only smoother and with rounded edges.

I felt around the squishy lump and found others like it, and judging by the gasps of my classmates, I guessed I was getting closer to the answer. Then out of nowhere, I had a eureka moment and decided to check if, altogether, the lumps made a shape.

One, two, three fingertips fit on a single row of lumps. Sliding my hand down, I also counted four rows. A three-by-four grid of twelve rubber lumps in all. Sadly, my excitement got the better of me.

“Is this a phone?” I said, recalling an arrangement of buttons numbered 1 through 9, plus a bottom row including the *, 0, and # sign.

“You were really close,” my teacher said, and helped me remove the blindfold. “It’s the TV remote.” The one for the old television in the classroom; there were no phones lying around back then.

This isn’t a story about how I succeeded where others did not. Truth is, I came up short that day and forgot about this memory until after I completed the first draft of Heart and the Art of First Contact, decades later. No, this is a story about the value of teaching empathy and the strangeness of failure. If you’ve read through this entire blog post and you’re wondering what this experience has to do with aliens, well, my response is that I can confidently say you haven’t read my first book.

Go on. Enjoy. Heart and the Art of First Contact available for purchase today on Amazon.