PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The thesis of this chapter is: the body with its diseases can be experienced in a new way by listening. In the natural sciences we are used to getting into contact with natural phenomena via visual perception. But there is no a priori reason that this has to be like that necessarily. Scientific explanation, modeling and forming of a theory, is supposed to be independent from the modality of the individual perception. There is no reason to assume that a congenitally blind person cannot be as good a scientist as a deaf person. However, there is no guarantee that an exclusively visual and an exclusively auditory perception of phenomena will lead to the same models and theories. On the contrary, it is probable that the evaluation of perceptions by the visual and the auditory sense stresses different aspects and thereby will lead, for example, to complementary conclusions, particularly when complex phenomena are involved. Should this thought turn out to be correct, it would provide an important motivation to test how the modality of listening can be exploited systematically in the natural sciences and in medicine. The present contribution deals with the problem that arises first in this endeavor, namely the fact that in the case of human physiology many processes, among them the electric activity of neurons in the brain, do not generate any sound. So how can we listen to processes that cannot be heard?