I know absolutely nothing about sensory evolution. However, I do have a dog called Mud. Some of you boarders will have met her when you have come to dinner at my home, and a few others will meet her this week. She is a very sweet dog, but like all black Labradors, she does not have great eyesight. She can see perfectly well for a short distance, but anything mid-range she simply picks up. She does have, though, an amazing sense of smell and she adores bread. If I open the breadbin in the kitchen at home, she can be in another room altogether at the other end of the house, and yet she will be next to me in a few seconds, asking for food – which I always find remarkable, since I cannot always smell the bread even when standing next to it. This acute sense of smell seems to me to be one way that she, as a dog, compensates for the challenge of not great eyesight. She will also almost literally ask for a bite. She cannot speak yet the way she sits and uses her eyes and tilts her head pathetically is pretty hard to resist.
One can see a similar thing with blind cricketers. One of the cricket coaches here at school, Mr Wood, is also coach of England’s blind cricket team, who are currently training for next year’s Ashes – and good luck to them after the showing of the able-sighted team recently. Those blind players, he tells me, can bowl at 70mph. The ball is hard but has a rattle in it so that you can hear it coming; and both batsmen and fielders therefore have to have an acute sense of hearing to be able to play the game – and they are awe-inspiringly good at it. Not only that, but some of the players are partially sighted and others are completely blind, so the way they have to communicate with one another to let their teammates know where the ball is, is also clever.
Mankind and animals more widely, it seems, find a way to overcome challenges so that they can understand what is going on around them, and often these also involve finding ways to communicate with one another when it is difficult, for whatever reason. There are also man-made obstructions to our sensory behaviours. In Ancient Greece, a court room would be a gathering of up to 600 people, often old men, outside listening to one of the orators of the day putting the case for one of his defendants. Now, Greeks have never had the reputation of being a quiet lot – they are garrulous, energetic, argumentative and full of life. Anybody who has been to a meal with a few Greek families can attest to that, and the Greek courtroom of 600 is unlikely to have been stony quiet. This presented orators with a unique challenge. Demosthenes, one of the greats, used to go down to the beach to practise, fill his mouth with pebbles and declaim his speech to the breaking waves. To be heard in such a situation, one had to speak loudly, clearly, slowly and passionately. One can also assume that to communicate, he used his full array of tricks – wild gesticulations, contortions of the face, deliberately exaggerated acting. It would have been fun to watch.
And now we have our own man-made challenge to our senses – the wearing of masks. These affect not just our ability to communicate loudly enough, like Demosthenes had to, but also visually, by taking away the possibility of facial expression, which at least Demosthenes could use in those rowdy courts. So, my question to you is, like the dog or the blind cricketer, how are we going to adapt to this to make our communication as good as possible?
There is no doubt about the importance of good communication. It is, in my opinion, the single most common cause of disasters as well as triumphs. Take, for instance, a book called Aviation English by Dr Dominique Estival from the University of Western Sydney, which claims that miscommunication has led to the deaths of over 2000 in plane crashes since the mid-1970s. She was particularly concerned by the communication between English and non-English speaking pilots, citing the example of pilots in Australia saying “cleared for the big smoke” when cleared for take-off, which was potentially dangerous when they were communicating with a non-English speaker. One of the crashes came after the plane crew reported “running out of fuel” instead of using the main international distress signal of Mayday or Pan Pan. ‘While in plain English, “we’re running out of fuel” may sound like a declaration of emergency, in the context of controller-pilot communications, where there is a specific prescribed phraseology for the declaration of an emergency, this statement would not be interpreted as such,’ she said.
On the flip side, there are times when amazing communication is simply a delight. One of the most famous was in 1842, as the British Empire was expanding in India, when Sir Charles Napier was sent to put down a mutiny in the province of Sindh. He was expressly told not to conquer the province, but simply to put down the mutiny; but once he discovered how little resistance there was, he took over the province with ease. He then sent one of the most memorable puns of all time back to his superiors in a single Latin word: “peccavi”. “Peccare” in Latin means “to sin”. So, by writing “peccavi”, he actually wrote, “I have sinned”.
So, back to the question, how are we going to communicate well with a mask on? Animals and humans have always found ways to deal with challenges thrown at communication, verbal and non-verbal. No doubt, you have to raise your voice louder than normal, you have to speak more clearly and, probably, more slowly – all like Demosthenes. Maybe you need to practise, therefore, ridiculous as that will sound to you. You will need to use gesticulation appropriately. You will need to breathe appropriately. Interestingly, on that front, singing is very hard with a mask, because you need to breathe in a lot of air; I found in the carol services that breathing through my teeth was easier, as it did not suck in the mask. You will probably need to think a bit more about how you are communicating rather than taking it for granted. A concentration on oracy will be helpful. And you will certainly need to work harder to listen, to receive all signs of communication. So, although most people do not enjoy wearing a mask much, it is actually quite an interesting challenge.