If your ears can’t hear what someone is saying what about listening with your skin?
According to a study in the journal Nature, sensations on the skin can help people understand speech.
Just like looking at someone’s lips in a noisy place, or if you have a hearing loss, feeling, can also help you hear.
“From our brain’s point of view, we can hear with our eyes,” says Bryan Gick, a professor of phonetics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
“From my point of view, we’re whole-body perceiving machines,” Gick says. “We just take all of the information that comes at us in our environment and merge it into a percept of something that happened in the world.”
Where does the Integration Happen?
David Ostry, a professor of psychology at McGill University in Montreal says these days the big scientific question isn’t whether our brains routinely integrate sensory information, but how.
“It’s up for grabs where within the brain this kind of integration is happening,” he says.
One possibility is areas in the brain that process sensory information, Ostry says. But he notes it’s also possible that integration takes place in the motor cortex, which controls our muscles.
Researchers say what they learn about how other senses influence hearing could help people with hearing loss, as well as people such as commercial airline pilots, who often have to decipher speech in a noisy environment.
If your ears can’t hear what someone is saying what about listening with your skin?
According to a study in the journal Nature, sensations on the skin can help people understand speech.
Just like looking at someone’s lips to help you hear better, feeling sounds can also help you hear.
“From our brain’s point of view, we can hear with our eyes,” says Bryan Gick, a professor of phonetics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. ”We’re whole-body perceiving machines,” Gick says. “We just take all of the information that comes at us in our environment and merge it into a percept of something that happened in the world.”
Where does the Integration Happen?
There’s no question that our brains routinely integrate sensory information, but how our brains do that, is still unclear. One possibility is that integration takes place in the motor cortex, which controls our muscles.
Researchers say what they learn about how other senses influence hearing could help people with hearing loss, as well as people such as commercial airline pilots, who often have to decipher speech in a noisy environment.