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The downside of concentration: It can make you deaf | News | National Post
Believe it or not, it can. The term has recently been coined “inattentional deafness” by a group of British researchers from University College London. They have discovered that people can become deaf to perfectly audible sounds when focusing heavily on a task.
Their study — published in the the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics — had over a hundred participants perform tasks on a computer involving a series of cross shapes. The easy tasks asked participants to distinguish a clear colour difference between the cross arms. The difficult task involved distinguishing subtle length differences between the cross arms.
During both experiments a tone was played unexpectedly through headphones they were wearing. At this point, immediately after the sound was played, the experiment was stopped and the participants asked if they had heard the sound. Sure enough, when participants were engrossed in the more challenging task they were four times more likely not to hear the noise.
Lead researcher and professor Nilli Lavie explains the phenomenon effecting our everyday life in this manner: “When engrossed in a good book or even a captivating newspaper article we may fail to hear the train driver’s announcement and miss our stop, or if we’re texting whilst walking, we may fail to hear a car approaching and attempt to cross the road without looking,” says Lavie in a statement.
The researchers believe this deafness is the result of our hearing and seeing senses sharing a limited processing capacity. It is already known that people similarly experience “inattentional blindness” when engrossed in a task that takes up all of their attentional capacity – for example, the famous Invisible Gorilla Test, where observers engrossed in a basketball game fail to observe a man in a gorilla suit walk past.
Believe it or not, it can. The term has recently been coined “inattentional deafness” by a group of British researchers from University College London. They have discovered that people can become deaf to perfectly audible sounds when focusing heavily on a task.
Their study — published in the the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics — had over a hundred participants perform tasks on a computer involving a series of cross shapes. The easy tasks asked participants to distinguish a clear colour difference between the cross arms. The difficult task involved distinguishing subtle length differences between the cross arms.
During both experiments a tone was played unexpectedly through headphones they were wearing. At this point, immediately after the sound was played, the experiment was stopped and the participants asked if they had heard the sound. Sure enough, when participants were engrossed in the more challenging task they were four times more likely not to hear the noise.
Lead researcher and professor Nilli Lavie explains the phenomenon effecting our everyday life in this manner: “When engrossed in a good book or even a captivating newspaper article we may fail to hear the train driver’s announcement and miss our stop, or if we’re texting whilst walking, we may fail to hear a car approaching and attempt to cross the road without looking,” says Lavie in a statement.
The researchers believe this deafness is the result of our hearing and seeing senses sharing a limited processing capacity. It is already known that people similarly experience “inattentional blindness” when engrossed in a task that takes up all of their attentional capacity – for example, the famous Invisible Gorilla Test, where observers engrossed in a basketball game fail to observe a man in a gorilla suit walk past.