I Was Attacked In The City

I was attacked in the city today.

It was around lunch time so the mall was full of people. I had just left a business meeting with my 85yr old father. Although I try to walk slowly to stay close to him, I usually end up a couple of metres ahead.

As we were walking down the lower part of Brisbane’s Queen Street Mall, I noticed the awning above had cast a striped shadow on the pavement in front of me. Without warning, my head & left ear tingled like a sharp electric shock, and suddenly, everything started to spin violently. I rapidly mumbled “f**k, f**k, f**k” and reached out to the left, stumbling towards a shop window.

Grasping the window with my left hand, I held my forehead with the other and pressed my head against the glass, to feel something stable & remain upright.

My father had now caught up to me and could see that something was wrong. I told him I was having a Ménières attack. There was little he could do to help other than stand nearby, watching with concern.

After a minute or so the vertigo started to subside, so I could now see the scene around me. A bench was a few metres away and I thought, “Maybe I should try to sit down?”, then I saw the face of a man seated on the bench. He was staring at me inquisitively, like I was a specimen in a bottle, or a drama show unfolding. I looked around and noticed a few other faces staring at me. Necks craned as they walked by.

Nobody stopped to help me; nobody looked sympathetic to my crisis. I wasn't bleeding. I wasn't old. I wasn't crippled. I looked strong, so why should anyone care? For the most part Ménières disease is an invisible illness, so bystanders have no idea of the terror that is being inflicted upon the sufferer during an attack.

The 19th century poet Henry David Thoreau wrote that most men lead “lives of quiet desperation.” This is tragically true of people afflicted by Vestibular disorders like Ménières disease. The isolation that comes from the ever present dizziness & hearing loss, punctuated by moments of frightening, spontaneous vertigo; surely there can be nothing so quietly desperate.

Dear reader, please remember my story and share it with others, so that people enduring Vestibular disorders won’t feel so quietly desperate & alone. Empathy & understanding go a long way.

If you are compassionate &/or can relate to my story please:

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HAVE YOU HAD A SIMILAR EXPERIENCE? Share your story below.

Echolocation vs. the Quietest Place on Earth

I read a news article this week about an ‘anechoic chamber’* at Orfield Laboratories in North America. The Guinness World Records have declared it “the quietest place on Earth”, for its ability to absorb 99.9% of sound.

The chamber is surrounded by 1m thick fiberglass acoustic wedges, has double walls of insulated steel and 30cm thick concrete (see picture above). According to Steven Orfield, the longest anybody has been able to sit in the darkened chamber was 45mins.

In the dark, it’s so quiet that the occupant becomes the sound, hearing only their body (i.e. heart beating, lungs breathing). Apparently this is a very disorientating experience, so much so that the occupant must be seated.

Mr Orfield said, “How you orient yourself is through sounds you hear when you walk. In the anechoic chamber, you don't have any cues. You take away the perceptual cues that allow you to balance and manoeuvre. If you're in there for half an hour, you have to be in a chair.” As a unilateral, hard of hearing person, I found this statement to be very interesting.

NASA has a similar chamber which they can put a water tank in to ascertain how long it takes before an astronaut starts to hallucinate, or whether they could even work in such an environment. The chamber absorbs electromagnetic energy to simulate the open space environment. Space is like a giant anechoic chamber.

This got me thinking about the connection between our hearing and our orientation in the environment around us. Our inner ear consists of a cochlea (which picks up sound), the labyrinth (semi-circular canals that perceives rotational movements), and the otolithic organs (which transduce linear accelerations). It’s interesting that the cochlea contributes to orientation in so much that that the brain uses sound to support other orientation inputs (Vestibular system, Somatosensory system of proprioception & kinesthesia, Vision). I suppose that’s the reason the inner ear is connected the way that it is.

This reminded me of a teenager I had heard about years ago named Ben Underwood**. Ben, who became blind weeks before his third birthday, had an amazing ability to use echolocation to ‘see’ his environment. Echolocation is the ability to detect the surrounding environment by sensing echoes bouncing off objects.

By clicking his tongue, Ben was able to hear the distinctive echoes around him. One of Ben’s observations was that “people sound just like the surface of water” (which would make sense considering the human body averages approx. 60% water). He became so good at using echolocation that he was able to ride a bike, rollerblade, play video games, try karate and even surf waves.

Even though a sighted person wouldn’t use the clicking technique employed by Ben, they would still rely on their hearing to navigate as demonstrated in the darkened anechoic chamber.

*Anechoic: Neither having nor producing echoes.

**Unfortunately Ben passed away in 2009 from a brain tumour just before his seventeenth birthday. He lived a remarkable life in a short time and still inspires others today.

HAVE YOU FOUND THAT YOUR ORIENTATION HAS DIMINISHED WITH YOUR HEARING LOSS? IF SO, SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCES BELOW.

Read more about The Quietest Place on Earth here:

The World's Quietest Place

Read more about Ben’s Echolocation here:

Ben Underwood