The Italians got it right about some of the important things in life, like olive oil and coffee. But they got it right about something else, too, something that brain researchers have only just realized. The Italian for "to hear," sentire, is the same (in its reflexive form) as the verb "to touch," (sentirse). In Italian, at least, there is no special distinction between hearing and touching.
Scottish musician Evelyn Glennie knows instinctively that this is true. Glennie has the distinction of being the only solo percussionist in the field of classical music. She is also profoundly deaf, meaning that she can hear, but the sound quality her brain perceives is not good enough to allow her to understand the spoken word. Hearing, she says, is nothing more than a specialized form of the sense of touch -- the touch of air on your eardrums.
Radiologists and researchers into deafness now have more reason to agree with Glennie (and with the instictive link implicit in Italian). Earlier this week, researchers met in Chicago at the 87th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. There, Dean Shibata, assistant professor of radiology at the University of Washington, told them that the brains of deaf people become rewired to enable them to process vibrations like hearing people process sound. Shibata's findings explain how deaf people can "hear" music at concerts and might even explain how Beethoven, famously deaf by the time he composed his greatest works, could have sensed his music.