Superhumans Impossible is just a big word thrown around by little men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given, rather than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact, it is more of a misused word that is actually an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration, it is a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing. The fictional universes devised by creative minds, where the superhuman or supernatural coexist with us ordinary people, are not entirely devoid of facts. Many of us are entranced by the mysterious appeal of the strange and unusual and, now more than ever, the superhuman is the subject of some of the most popular TV shows, movies, and books. There is just …show more content…
He was a healthy baby, until a month later his right pupil glazed over white. His mother took him immediately to the doctor, they told her he had Bilateral Retinoblastoma, which meant that he had cancer in both of his eyes. His right eye had to be removed after two months of chemo, and continued chemo another eight months, in order to try and save his left eye from being consumed by cancer. The chemo treatments failed, and he had to get his left eye removed, when he woke up from surgery he told his mother he could see nothing. In return, she responded with some of the most powerful words of wisdom a child could ever hear. “ Ben you can see! You can see me with your hands. You can smell me with your nose. You can hear me with your ears. You can’t use your eyes anymore, but you have your hands, your nose, your ears.” It was a slow recovery, but using his other four senses Ben started seeing again through the use of echolocation. Echolocation is when a person clicks their tongue at objects, and hears the echo bounce off of it, therefore letting them know what the object is, and if it is in their path. He is now 23 years old, and he can play video games, ride bikes, skate, climb trees, and do thing that ordinary people can do. Ben Underwood has applied to and been accepted to a college in Japan, and has completed his first science fiction novel. In conclusion, only two people are known to have mastered
Born hearing to deaf, signing parents, Mark gradually lost his hearing. Despite the fact that his deaf parents preferred sign communication, Mark was raised and educated without the use of sign language. His parents and grandparents were concerned that sign might interfere with speech and restrict his educational achievement. Although Mark became increasingly hard-of-hearing, he worked hard to "pass" as a hearing person. This ambition, he later discovered, actually constricted his development and limited the depth of relationships with family and friends. During these long years, he just "didn?t know what (he) was missing." When he later learned ASL, chose to mix with deaf people, and learned to perceive deafness as something special, his horizons expanded. He came to value communication and relationships above the things that seemed so important to many people, such as image, income, status, skills, religious background, or race.
Uncle Jim, and Erik Weihenmayer both are not born blind, but are both able to overcome their blindness to live life to the fullest extent. Both protagonists in the story share similar qualities, and traits to one, and another like being resilient, perseverance, determination, and a little bit of stubbornness to keep going, and never allow their blindness to dictate how they are able to live, but instead they are the ones who dictate how they want to live. Both stories showcase brilliant characters that were able to overcome their shortcomings which led to the betterment of their prospective
Peter Cook was born with the capability to hear, but acquired spinal meningitis at the age of three, deafening him for the rest of his life. Although he was born in West Virginia, his family moved around often, however he went to a Pennsylvania school for the deaf up until ninth grade. Then he attended a prep school where there were hearing students so he was forced to sit the front to try and comprehend what his teachers were teaching. He began writing poetry when he was quite young to communicate his internal thoughts. When Cook was nineteen he was exposed to American Sign Language (ASL) which allowed him to express his thoughts more creatively. When he watched others sign poems, they left him with a blank slate, never forcing him to imagine what they are conveying. The poetry was always signed in a literal sense, which Cook disliked, so he took workshops that helped him become in touch with his more creative side. He learned to articulate his ASL with repetitive hand shapes that were similar to their actual form. Following college he founded a non-profit organization called Flying Words Project. This...
In the short story Cathedral, by Raymond Carver, there is a direct contrast between a blind man named Robert, and the narrator. The narrator has full use of his senses, and yet he is limited to the way he sees things, and the way he thinks. Robert however, has a very different outlook on life and how he sees things, as well as the use of his senses. At the end of the story, Robert has the narrator close his eyes to try and get him to experience the world the way he does. The narrator ends up being able to not only see the way Robert does, but he also is able to feel the world in a completely different way. The author suggests that the mind is most important in how people view things, and the judgements we make are based on what we see in our heads, instead of what is really there.
Bill Strickland spends his days helping people through Manchester Bidwell. He founded job training programs and also a community arts program to help and mentor young people. When Bill Strickland was younger he did not have the tools and everything he gives to the kids now for mentoring. Strickland’s life changed when he found pottery. It was something he was good at from the start. Bill grew up in Pittsburgh, and it was not the prettiest. People were losing their jobs and the town was falling apart. Strickland’s mother shaped him to be a successful man. She did not let him “fall into the ghettos trapdoor”. Strickland spends his life trying to fix the substandard neighborhood that he grew up in.
“It would have been difficult to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of that eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the first time longed for a new day to come. I had now the key to all language, and I was eager to learn to use it” (Keller 146). The ability to actually comprehend words and associate those words to thoughts and feelings rejuvenated her. Keller was reborn that day, with a new ‘vision’ and a new direction. What started that day, culminated into Keller becoming the first deaf person to earn a bachelors degree. She learnt to speak and ‘hear’ by following the movements of people’s lips. Keller was extremely hardworking and she personified willpower and diligence by patiently untangling the taboos of society to prove her critics wrong.
In life everyone is going to have to go through struggles and trials, however in times of suffering, having a strong support system and faith can help get through anything. The book is Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. The book is about an Olympic athlete named Louie Zamperini, that joined the military. Louie is captured, and tortured by the Japanese after his military plane crashed. Louie and his fellow prisoners are then tasked with trying to survive the Japanese POW camps. What are the underlying themes of Unbroken? In Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand three themes that stand out in the story are faith, suffering, and friendship.
Our enemy was the Japanese, but when the war ended, it also had another story to it, and it was Louie, a survivor of the American army, and a survivor from a prisoner of war camp. Louie’s life was that he was an athlete in his childhood, and the one who made Louie into an athlete was Pete, his big brother in the family, which his brother was the one that encouraged Louie the most. When Louie was older, he joined the army, and when he joined, he was still running and practiced like an athlete. When Louie was growing up, he kept on changing his personalities, and was growing new traits as he learned from others, and had joy with loved ones too. In the book Unbroken, the author Laura Hillenbrand described Louie as
In literature, blindness serves a general significant meaning of the absence of knowledge and insight. In life, physical blindness usually represents an inability or handicap, and those people afflicted with it are pitied. The act of being blind can set limitations on the human mind, thus causing their perception of reality to dramatically change in ways that can cause fear, personal insecurities, and eternal isolation. However, “Cathedral” utilizes blindness as an opportunity to expand outside those limits and exceed boundaries that can produce a compelling, internal change within an individual’s life. Those who have the ability of sight are able to examine and interpret their surroundings differently than those who are physically unable to see. Carver suggests an idea that sight and blindness offer two different perceptions of reality that can challenge and ultimately teach an individual to appreciate the powerful significance of truly seeing without seeing. Therefore, Raymond Carver passionately emphasizes a message that introduces blindness as not a setback, but a valuable gift that can offer a lesson of appreciation and acceptance toward viewing the world in a more open-minded perspective.
Humans have five senses. Sight, taste, smell, touch, and hearing are what paint reality, but the lack of one these senses, particularly sight, can enrich the remaining four. The remaining senses become a crutch, or prosthetic leg that constitute the gateway to one’s environment. Yet for these senses to construct one’s environment non visually, the four senses left must work
...en information. With the use of echolocation, whales and dolphins can communicate between individuals, hunt, navigate, and visualize their surroundings even though they can’t always see it. An organisms ability to adapt and survive and environment is known as fitness, and has been perfected by whales in such a way that they haven’t significantly evolved for about 33 million years. Scientists have been using this extraordinary sense of communication, and depiction to identify in humans, specifically blind humans, the ability to use this advanced method of environmental depiction, and how they have used it to not only see their surroundings, detect movements in surroundings, and use this skill not only to navigate by walking, but even use this to depict what their entire environment looks like, what it contains, and what materials are present in the environment.
There is a South African Proverb that states "Until lions write books, history will always glorify the hunter". In his play "Los Vendidos", Luis Valdez tries to become a lion and let the voice of Chicano history be heard. Luis Valdez does this in a satirical way by presenting the views and stereotypes that many American’s have had and continue to have, about Chicano’s in the form of a shop where Chicano "model/robots" are sold. By presenting each Chicano as a robot and stereotype, Luis Valdez tries to earse of the "models" of Chicano’s that people have in their heads and tries to point out that there is a strong Chicano culture and a rich history that has been ignored by American’s for years. "Los Vendidos" is a challenge to all people but especially American’s to think about why these stereotypes are so known in culture and the role that American culture has played in creating and maintaining these stereotypes.
When we are born, we can see but we cannot put anything into words. When we’re older we visualize. Visualization is the way we interact with the world. Dillard discusses how some people who have corrected and restored their sight from blindness are delighted with their sight. They see things as they really are in a way that those who always see things cannot. Like an object is seen in shape and color rather than in its name and purposes. Those that have not seen never take the beauty of sight for granted. Both Annie Dillard and John Berger agree that we cannot see clearly. Berger thinks it is because of external influences while Dillard thinks because nature and ignorance won’t let us.
Deductive reasoning is general information people have and use to reach to some type of conclusion. Deductive is done by understanding the first part which is using logic to reach a conclusion which reasoning is to understand what is going on. There are many different ways to explain what is required of deductive reasoning. For example, in an article, it states, “logical way of reaching a conclusion based on ded...
The human eye is far more complex than one of humanity’s most advanced creations, the computer chip. A single human eye possesses 130 million light-sensitive rods and cones that convert light into chemical impulses, and these signals subsequently travel at a rate of about one billion per second to the brain. The sensitivity range of the eye, which provides humanity with excellent vision during bright and sunny days as well as during dim, moonlit nights, far surpasses the visual capabilities of any manmade film. Now consider that we are in possession of not just a single eye, but two of them. This matching pair, coupled with an interpretive center in the brain, allows us to determine distances to the objects we see. Furthermore, our eyes have the ability to automatically focus on near or distant objects, by elongating or compressing themselves. The eyes are also inserted beneath a hard, bony brow that – in addition to the automatic shutters we possess, in the form of eyelids – provides shelter and security for these delicate ...