I love those classic conversation starters.
Genius overcomes many difficulties.
As evidence, we have the pantheon of blind and deaf artists, ranging from Beethoven to Goya to Milton to Ray Charles. For an adult, blindness and deafness are about equally problematic. Anyone who has had the opportunity to teach a deaf child knows this. Hearing is the primary channel through which we receive language, and all of those incoming words downloaded into our brains carry a wealth of emotional and cognitive apparatus that structures and empowers our imagination. Language is the mind's opposable thumb.