You wake up tomorrow and discover you are either blind or deaf.

A coworker and I got into a debate of whether losing your sight or hearing would be worse.

Argument for losing sight -
You would have the memories of what things look liked, color and descriptions would make sense and you would be able to follow conversations easily. You could learn braille to read and have devices to read to you.

Argument against losing sight -
You would not really have any idea of what was in the room with you. Fear would probably be more common as you can't see the unknown. You would have to rely on others for many things. You would have to learn how to detect emotion through sound. You would never get to see anything new (art, movies, pictures etc). You will never see your children/grandchildren grow up, get married etc.

Argument for losing hearing -
You could see everything around you and you could learn lip reading etc. You know what things sound like so you as you are watching things, memories of sound will help follow along. Visual cues can tell you things that hearing can not tell you.

Argument against losing hearing -
You could not hear what was going on around you if you were not directly facing it. Communication with others may be hard since you will need line of sight to read lips. The silence will drive you crazy since you are not used to it. You would never hear your grand kids speak. You would never hear any new music.


Which one would you prefer to lose and what arguments do you have against losing one over the other?

BTW, I am for losing sight. I think the silence would kill me.

Hearing and it's not even close.

Sight is far more powerful than hearing. Anyone sane would choose to lose their ability to hear. A silent video contains far more information than an audio recording.

This. It's sooo much harder to kill yourself when you are blind.

Losing hearing obv. You dont depend on others and you are not even close to the handicap of losing sight. In addition working on computer/playing poker and so on is the same without hearing, but without sight it is almost the same. Also you get more information from reading than from listening, you can still watch movies and you can lead so much closer to normal life. And I even think science is closer to giving deaf people hearing than to blind people sight, which is also a factor. And you quickly get used to the silence and I think it is never (or maybe extremely rarely) a problem.

I'd rather lose hearing, obviously. If I lose my hearing today, I could probably make a completely successful trip to the grocery store this afternoon. No way that's true if I'm blind.

I once had this discussion with a musician who said he would find life unbearable without music, so he would chose to lose sight. I think this would be a decision he would regret quite quickly.

No, for a musician it could be true.

Sight is a two dimensional sense. You see width and height. Hearing is a one dimensional sense - there's only frequency which you hear. You can represent what you are hearing with a line. It's not possible to do that with vision because it is fundamentally in a higher dimension. You need a plane to represent what you are seeing - it's impossible to represent vision using a line.

Put some powerful noise canceling headphones on for a day and see how you manage. Some things would be somewhat difficult (such as communicating with others) but you would manage. Now try a day with a blindfold on. Could you even go outside your house without the assistance of others?

This. Was stone deaf in left ear and over 90% loss in right ear (yay 2x misdiagnosed and 2+ week effectively untreated fungal ear infection.. so clogged my left ear actually grew a fungus tail out of the ear canal), and it really wasn't all that much of an annoyance besides hurting like a mother****er. Blind would be instant huge life change for the worse.

Hearing. I need my sight to earn a living.

note the large area in the back dedicated to sight, seems pretty obvious that we have evolved to be way more dependent on sight than hearing

EEEEEEEEEWWWWWW.

I had this discussion once when I was taking a psych course as an undergrad (many years ago). I had the opinion prevalent here, sight seems more important in general and I assumed I would miss it the most. The professor got involved and disagreed. He claimed that studies showed that loss of hearing caused greater emotional problems due to the severe impairment of human communication.

I think I would like to hold on to both, but the answer may be more complicated than this thread has recognized. I did a quick search and got this which seems to agree with the instinctive opinion:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8356208

Just food for thought.

Yeah. And it was fun having absolutely no idea what was going on too. Should have made this a medical mystery #5. Guy goes in and says he thinks he has swimmer's ear. And he does, just fungal instead of bacterial.

Candida?

How is there not a poll? I honestly can't really fathom people saying losing sight over hearing unless musician

Yeah.

woohoo!!

This is not close at all. I would lose hearing, taste and smell way before i would lose sight. With the internet and texting and things now days you can easily go days with out any reason to talk to anyone.

This makes sense. Wouldn't affect me though

hearing by a mile. That way I have a valid excuse for not listening to my date's boring drivel

more interesting question would be lose sight vs. lose all 4 other senses. still option B by a long shot tho.

A more interesting question is if you were to be born without sight or hearing which would be preferable to lose.

I asked this question to an expert on the deaf and she told me that being born deaf created more problems to socialization and learning than being born blind.

Now, I don't know if she was over dramatizing the problems.


But back to my question which is preferable?


Being born blind or being born deaf?

We might need to ask experts in the field.

That may not mean that it's less preferable, though.