I’VE written elsewhere about change.

As I said then, it can be overwhelming and sometimes our instinct is to shut our eyes, swathe ourselves in a protective shell and ignore it.

But mankind moves forward only through change. It can be scary but it should also be exciting. The two go hand in hand.

Our understanding of the universe is always changing and we should never arrogantly assume we have all the answers. Chances are a hundred years from now some smart-arse scientist or philosopher will overturn everything we hold as sacrosanct.

For example, how many senses do we have?

Five? That’s what we’ve always been told. Sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste (I’m not counting the ability to see dead people here, sorry Bruce).

But that figure needs revising, according to new scientific thinking. Scientists now include our sense of balance and a sense of orientation, as in the ability to tell whether we are upside down or not.

Our understanding of things is often changed when one idea collides with another in new and unexpected ways. Same ingredients, new combinations.

I was fascinated this week to read about work being done at Colorado State University to help people with loss of hearing to be able to ‘hear’ through their tongues.

Researchers there hope one day that people with substantial hearing loss may no longer need to have a surgically implanted cochlear device in their ear to have their sense of sound restored.

Their ground-breaking work is developing Bluetooth technology that combines an earpiece with a tongue-pad which communicate sounds to the wearer so they can ‘hear’.

I suppose it gives new meaning to the notion of having good taste in music, doesn’t it?

Although the world around us is constantly changing, some things never change, do they?

Man’s inability to get along being the main one. I do worry about my children’s future. But in many ways, how is their future any different to the one I faced at the same age?

When I switch the news on, the same images I watched on our old, cumbersome Rediffusion television set in the 1970s are still there. Tanks rolling across barren wasteland. Missiles being launched. Desperate mothers crying for dead children at the hands of a tyrant. Same images, just different circumstances.

So why do we go on in the face of such seemingly preordained misery?

It’s mankind’s indomitable spirit, a hardwired belief that things will get better.

Or, to quote Samuel Beckett, the need to ‘fail better’.