Podcast on the brain and navigation

[kestrell]

Being a navigationally-challenged blind woman, I found this episode of RadioLand titled "Lost and Found" particularly fascinating. One of the things which I find curious about sighted people is how often they reduce navigation to a visual experience, when what is going on is really a multi-modal process, and this episode does a great job of explaining about that. Also, the segment with Charlie the Pigeon Man of Cornell is absolutely great, not only because how pigeons find their way home is really cool but because scientists are still compelled to admit f*** if they know how the birdbrains do it. Finally, the last segment is just a total tearjerker, because there can never be too many true stories about a blind woman and the guy with the not-so-secret-fuzzy-heart who loves her
http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Really, our human race needs a wild overgrowth of fuzzy human hearts!

Oh! Oh! Oh! It's *that* story. "Finding Emilie" makes me cry every time I listen. Because that fuzzy-hearted guy just believed. No matter how unlikely it seemed, he trusted that he would find her; she would find him; and all would be well.

[kestrell]

I had never hear (or even heard of) "Finding Emily" before, so I pretty much sat there, hynotized and paralyzed, listening to this story. Very few stories make me tear up, but this one did, because, like other stories that make me tear up, I thought it really was a romantic story. Romantic for me has to do with people who really have been through hell together, and stayed together despite everything the world threw at them, even when the world tells them they should give up.

The last Boston Pride parade I went to was the one right after same-sex marriage was legalized,so there were large numbers of marchers holding signs which indicated how long they had been together and how many kids they had together, etc. The couple that made me cry was the two old men in tuxedos holding a sign that said "50 years together."