I was able to sit down and work without being distracted by the TV, which is important at my workspace. I did find that I'd missed a couple of calls that I had to return, but as someone who doesn't really care for phone calls, I wasn't too disappointed to miss them. In actuality, the first three hours of the experience were really rather enjoyable.
As I've gotten older, I've somewhat lost my ability to tune things out. I'm much more easily distracted, and have a harder time focusing like I did when I was a youth. The earplugs were very good for my long-lost concentration. The deafness allowed me to withdraw into the bubble that I used to be able to move to anytime I picked up a book. I don't think I'd like to be deaf though. I'd likely start to miss it eventually.
As I got toward the three hour mark, I decided to try and interact a little bit, and went upstairs to hang with the old lady for a bit. She was watching TV, and I found that not being able to hear anything was good for paying attention to the editing of the shows. She was watching some arts and crafts show, and without having to listen to the awful people on the screen spout their drivel, the show was a lot more interesting to watch from a structural standpoint. I did have some trouble communicating with the lady friend, but after nearly six years together, I haven't listened to her in quite some time anyway, so it wasn't very different.
I think that this exercise was made a lot easier by the foreknowledge that I would be getting my hearing back in a couple of hours. The actual loss of a sense is easy to recreate in the physical sense, but the psychological impact of a loss like that is impossible to imagine. What I found myself thinking about is the difference between being born with a missing sense, or losing a sense. It's tough to pick which scenario would be harder. If you were born without hearing, I suppose you wouldn't have the memory of it to miss. But, wouldn't the memory of sound be something you'd want. I imagine it would make communication easier, to have had some concept of what speech is before losing your hearing. I don't know. It would be pretty crappy, except for the freedom to ignore anyone.
While I was living in my mostly silent universe, I got to thinking about what sense people should have that they don't already. Almost all of my initial thoughts were really just extensions of our current senses, such as being able to see atoms, or hear in a greater range. It's kind of tough to imagine another sense, as I've been limited to the five (or six, if you count balance) that I've always had. An interesting sense to have would be the ability to detect and send thoughts and images through radio waves in addition to audible spectrum sound waves, but that ability would effectively be ESP, and so is discounted for this exercise. The truly new is hard to come by.
So I guess that my attempt to create a new sense would involve an instant emotional thermometer. This would be an apparatus located just above the Adam's Apple which would be able to detect the mood that people nearby were experiencing. Called by some, "the empathetic organ," this wouldn't be about reading minds but more about deciding how or even if one should approach another person, and how to interact with them appropriately. Although people have adapted to this lack of empathy pretty well, by using crude indicators like body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions, this new sense would make things quite a bit easier, and cut out all sorts of faux pas. No longer would you tell someone how great you feel on the same day that they get dumped by their wife. On the downside though, I guess you couldn't help but be read by the emotional thermometer. So one could still make others feel bad by being in a good mood. Or you could have a contagious bad mood. Man, this thing could be a downer.
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