14 DAY TRIAL // According to the conclusions of a new scientific study, it would appear that being too focused or concentrated can actually make people deaf to the world around them, in the strictest sense of the word.
Inordinate concentration can take up so much of the brain's resources that people actually become deaf for limited periods of time, unable to process sounds coming from all around them. This may be a method the brain uses to increase its focus.
Investigators explain that this phenomenon develops because our visual and auditory cortical processing areas share the same, limited processing capacity. As such, when focusing on a purely visual task, the amount of processing capacity that remains available for hearing is severely diminished.
This could also explain why so many people prefer to close their eyes when they listen to music that they really like, or want to understand and decipher better. This type of behavior has recently been named inattentional deafness.
Details of the new research focusing on inattentional deafness were published in the latest issue of the esteemed scientific journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, PsychCentral reports.
“Inattentional deafness is a common everyday experience,” explains Nilli Lavie, PhD, who is based at the University College London (UCL), in the United Kingdom. He is also a coauthor of the new paper.
“For example, 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,” the scientist adds.
The main conclusion of the new study is that we may become both blind and deaf to external stimuli when our attention is captured and focused by a difficult task. This result holds implications for the models trying to explain how and why hearing evolved.
“Hearing is often thought to have evolved as an early warning system that does not depend on attention, yet our work shows that if our attention is taken elsewhere, we can be effectively deaf to the world around us,” Lavie explains.
“In our task, most people noticed the sound if the task being performed was easy and did not demand their full concentration. However, when the task was harder they experienced deafness to the very same sound,” the expert concludes.