In Noise, Feeling

Photo by the author

I sat in a chair, the legs of my jeans pulled up to my knees, as a neurologist poked my leg with a pin.

“Can you feel that?” he asked each time.

“Yes,” I said.

He sat back down in his chair. “Did your socks or clothing labels bother you when you were a child?”

“Yes!” I said, feeling like he was psychic.

“You have what we call sensory modulation disorder,” he told me.

I had gone to see the neurologist about pain in my hands, but the visit elucidated other seemingly unrelated aspects of my life. I was probably the only passenger plugging my ears with my fingers that morning as the Red Line made its way under the streets of Boston, screeching every time the rails curved. When I rode the train with friends, I often said, “It’s so loud!” as I covered my ears. “I guess it is,” they always replied, but they did not seem bothered. I don’t fully understand the powerful effect sound exerts upon me, but I now own two pairs of ear protectors (one in the car, one in the house) to shut out noise when it pains me.

The ears have a mechanism called the acoustic reflex, which protects the eardrums from damaging sounds. A muscle in the ear can close during times of loud noise, but this doesn’t happen immediately. In the case of cannon gunners, it happened too late, and they became noticeably deaf after a time. The military devised a trick to trigger the ear to protect itself before the soldiers fired the cannons.

Years before the Boston neurologist asked me about my socks, another doctor—a psychologist—told me: “You’re like a sponge; you absorb everyone’s feelings.” I absorb everyone’s noise, too, loud and soft, wanted and unwanted. I take it all in. For me, noise is the same as feeling.

The ears of childhood

I was raised by my grandparents, both of whom were hard of hearing. My grandfather’s working life as a civil engineer meant he listened to bulldozers and other heavy machinery as he supervised the laying of sewer pipe and other infrastructure. He served in World War II. He was also a hunter, and therefore he had listened to years of gunfire, military and civilian. Sometimes he wore a hearing aid, but most times not.

Children and teenagers hear more acutely than adults, and they can detect higher frequencies. When I was a child, I didn’t think about what my grandparents’ sensory worlds were like. I only knew what I needed to do in order to be heard and understood at home: speak loudly and enunciate. My grandfather, though pragmatic and not particularly loquacious, occasionally showed a philosophical bent, and he may have had things to say about his dimmer world of sound. Both grandparents are long gone, and I can’t ask them.

Instead, I asked my seventy-year-old Italian friend. He recently got a hearing aid because his doctor told him he needed one.

“I could hear all the things wrong with my car,” he said. “I had to stop wearing it.”

Since his car is a thirty-five-year-old diesel Mercedes (loud even when new), the experience of suddenly hearing more acutely not only irritated him, but perhaps also scared and disoriented him in the way that sleeping in a new place makes you wonder at every sound—intruder, bear, branch, wind, who can say? The car runs, and then it doesn’t run. Who needs to hear the noise it makes as the muffler fails, as the suspension fails, as the tires lose their treads?

The “earing machine,” my Italian friend calls the hearing aids, his accent causing him to leave off the initial h. When I asked to borrow the hearing aids, he brought them to me. The batteries were dead. I charged them, read the manual, then inserted the earpieces in my ears.

The room in which I sat was still quiet, but I...