Quotes from Anne Karpf

Greeting the ageing self In trying to depathologize age, we need to make an important distinction, between resisting ageism (stereotyping or discriminating on the basis of age) and resisting age itself. The first opens the door to a path of rich potential, freeing us to keep on developing and changing, while the second closes it, condemning us to an endless attempt to recover the irretrievable.

Those who urge us to fight ageing are, in effect, inviting us to stop growing and developing

Yet some of the business of hearing is still frankly unfathomable. Although we know, for instance, that the brain procesess acoustic vibrations into neural signs, some of our phenomenal auditory talents, like translating the physical properties of sound into the abstract realm of meaning, remain a profound mystery, all the more since this occurs within 150 milliseconds after the beginning of the sound.

We can hear a wider range of frequencies than we can speak, but the frequencies to which the external auditory canal are most sensitive lie roughly int he middle of our hearing range, around 1000-3000 Hz. In other words, at normal volume, we detect the middle frequencies more easily than the high ones. In this way human beings have developed the most favourable capacities for speaking to and hearing each other.

His interviews revealed that the majority of Sak's employees, half of Macy's, but only one-fifth of Klein's sounded the 'r' clearly, bearing out his theory that a more emphasized 'r' was now the more prestigious pronunciation, and that social class is inscribed in the pronunciation of even a single sound.

Newborns can discriminate between their own cries and those of other babies. They get upset when they hear other babies cry, which is probably why, when one baby cries in a maternity ward, the others inevitably follow. It's always assumed that they're simply copying each other, but they're probably also pained by the sounds of distress. Human empathy develops early, and it's expressed vocally.

No other mammal produces even a fraction of the kind of original vocal play that human babies do.

People...who have no resources in themselves for securing a good and happy life find every age burdensome

When we de-repress the fear of death, we reclaim the energy that has gone into denial. We feel buoyed up as streams of creative energy course through our bodies, minds and nervous systems. By facing a subject that usually depresses and terrifies us, we feel lighter, freer, more perceptually and cognitively alive in all our encounters....Old age will no longer be a synonym for death, or dying, but for living.

Our civilization really does not harbour a concept of the whole of life

Hearing is one of the first senses to develop in a foetus-the ear has already begun to be formed in an eight-week-old foetus, and three months later is structurally complete. When we go to sleep, our perception of sound is the last sense to close off, and when we awake the first to start up again. And hearing, it's claimed, is the last sense to die at the end of life.