Walking thoughts

[xela]

A friend suggested I take pictures on my walks, and post them here. Which I think is a delightful idea, and plan to take up — but I've ended up walking in the dark the past couple days.

But on my walk tonight I had a random thought I'll share with you.

A man and a woman got out of a car maybe fifty feet in front of me, clearly deep in the throes of early love. They were cute, and watching them made me smile. As I walked past, something about them reminded me of a couple in a TV show I saw recently, where part of the action was that he callsher, both on their cell phones, and they go through bit of light comedy on the theme of her not recognizing who's calling.

Of course, being cell phones (and the characters not being nerds and thus unlikely to have disabled it), they have Caller-ID — and from what I've seen, most people take advantage of that most of the time when answering their call phones. Which made me wonder: Will the ubiquity of Caller-ID mean that the skill of identifying people by their voice on the phone disappears? Is it already, like legible handwriting, a former near universal skill that increasingly fewer people are acquiring? Was mine the last generation to be able to pick up a phone and identify most of our friends in a syllable or two?

I have no point here. Just sharing oddment of how my brain fires when not otherwise occupied.

Comments

[alierak.livejournal.com]

Hmm, not too many generations have had to deal with phones anyway, so we probably already had that skill for other reasons. I would guess that identifying people by voice alone, in the dark, has had survival implications at some point. I've also heard it claimed that babies can recognize their mothers' voices at birth, if not sooner. Like the ability to recognize faces, it's unlikely to fall out of our brains just because we also use text.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Yeah, certainly the ability to identify people by voice alone has an evolutionary advantage. I'm just thinking that the old-school telephone gave most of us in the West cause to develop that ability to a higher degree than our environment now may provide incentive to. For a comparison, consider that, for whatever reason, we have evolved the ability to imagine and perform musical sounds. We extended that ability by inventing and playing instruments. A century ago, when most middle-class homes had a piano, many otherwise ordinary people developed that ability into a fairly high-level skill. Now, comparatively few do.