Could you train your senses to become more acute?

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visceral_instinct

Monkey see, monkey denigrate
Valued Senior Member
I had a hearing problem due to a blockage in my ear, and though I went almost entirely deaf for about a day, it seemed that my brain compensated by 'hyper listening'.

I have had this fixed, everything now sounds extremely loud, even clicking a computer mouse sounds deafening.

If you were to undergo regular sessions of partial sensory deprivation for periods of time, for example wearing ear plugs, could you get your brain to maintain that 'hyper listening' phenomenon?
 
visceral_instinct said:
I had a hearing problem due to a blockage in my ear, and though I went almost entirely deaf for about a day, it seemed that my brain compensated by 'hyper listening'.

I have had this fixed, everything now sounds extremely loud, even clicking a computer mouse sounds deafening.

If you were to undergo regular sessions of partial sensory deprivation for periods of time, for example wearing ear plugs, could you get your brain to maintain that 'hyper listening' phenomenon?
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Yes. Especially with hearing. As an active musician for the past 7 years of my life I can gladly say that ears do get trained better to hear if you really focus on them. Keep in mind, its something I believe from personal experience.

There are plenty of cases Ive heard of where blind men have incredible hearing to compensate.

Also, I used to practice drums without ear plugs.

Then one day I started wearing them for about 7 months straight.

After those 7 months I took them off, started playing without them and I heard those drums better than I had ever heard them before. It was extremely loud for me however, and I had to have my plugs back on.
 
My first job was in an extremely noisy environment, and I had to wear earmuffs to keep my hearing; I found with the earmuffs on (and at the time, I was the only one wearing them, believe it or not) that I could hear the 'phone in the office, whereas nobody else could.

I find also that if I have to move about in a darkened room (say, on a moonless night) I end up hyperalert, because even if I know the room well, there's always the chance that you could smack into something that had been placed differently, like a chair that's been shifted. The last thing you want to do is knock something over loudly at 2 am and wake up someone who's sleeping in the next room...:)

Also, people tend to have hidden reserves of strength which are only called upon in extreme emergencies; there was a story from the Vietnam war about 4 soldiers who were travelling down a one-way jungle path in a jeep, when they were fired upon by the Viet Cong. They jumped out of the jeep, each man grabbed a wheelguard, and they lifted the jeep and turned it through 180degrees, then jumped in and drove away. When their sargeant disputed their story back at base, they were unable to repeat the job--not enough stress.
 
Graduate Program in Neurobiology and Behavior, University of Washington, United States.

Adaptation occurs in a variety of forms in all sensory systems, motivating the question: what is its purpose? A productive approach has been to hypothesize that adaptation helps neural systems to efficiently encode stimuli whose statistics vary in time. To encode efficiently, a neural system must change its coding strategy, or computation, as the distribution of stimuli changes. Information theoretic methods allow this efficient coding hypothesis to be tested quantitatively. Empirically, adaptive processes occur over a wide range of timescales. On short timescales, underlying mechanisms include the contribution of intrinsic nonlinearities. Over longer timescales, adaptation is often power-law-like, implying the coexistence of multiple timescales in a single adaptive process. Models demonstrate that this can result from mechanisms within a single neuron.
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src: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17714934

Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA 19129, USA. manuel.castro@drexel.edu

One prominent feature of sensory responses in neocortex is that they rapidly adapt to increases in frequency, a process called "sensory adaptation." Here we show that sensory adaptation mainly occurs during quiescent states such as anesthesia, slow-wave sleep, and awake immobility. In contrast, during behavior-ally activated states, sensory responses are already adapted. For instance, during learning of a behavioral task, when an animal is very alert and expectant, sensory adaptation is mostly absent. After learning occurs, and the task becomes routine, the level of alertness lessens and sensory adaptation becomes robust. The primary sensory thalamocortical pathway of alert and expectant animals is in the adapted state, which may be required for adequate sensory information processing.
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src: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14766183

So is what happens due to the deprivation of normal auditory stimuli allowing for a more acute responsivity to more subtle stimulation?
 
That was basically what happened with my hearing, I think. I had only low stimulation incoming, so my brain compensated by becoming more sensitive to that low stimulation...I assume..
 
I don't think you can.
Can you train your eyes to see better or train your ears to hear better? I don't think so. I think you can train yourself to pay attention better. To ignore background noises or to see small movements that you over looked before.

People are born with better senses than other people. I think you either have it or you don't.
 
Orleander said:
I don't think you can.
Can you train your eyes to see better or train your ears to hear better? I don't think so. I think you can train yourself to pay attention better. To ignore background noises or to see small movements that you over looked before.

People are born with better senses than other people. I think you either have it or you don't.
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Most of the seeing is done in the brain. The eyes just provide the input.
I think some aspects can be improved. It just depends on what Vis meant with more acute.
 
I meant more acute, as in better perception whether that is due to the brain adapting or your actual eyes or ears improving.
 
visceral_instinct said:
I meant more acute, as in better perception whether that is due to the brain adapting or your actual eyes or ears improving.
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The improvement will have to occur in the brain. Think of blind people that can hear way better then non-blind people.
 
But can they hear because there has been a physical change or because they have learned to focus and pay attention better?
 
Because of paying attention better.

When you have no hearing problems, you are better off blocking out lower stimuli, such as your own breathing, the rustle when you move, or people talking a moderate distance away.

When you're partially deaf, you need to pay extra attention to lower stimuli, otherwise you won't get a proper fix on your surroundings via your hearing. So your brain compensates by 'hyper listening'.

Then when you abruptly remove the cause of the deafness, your brain is still in that 'hyper listening' mode, so, everything sounds extremely loud.
 
visceral_instinct said:
Because of paying attention better.

When you have no hearing problems, you are better off blocking out lower stimuli, such as your own breathing, the rustle when you move, or people talking a moderate distance away.

When you're partially deaf, you need to pay extra attention to lower stimuli, otherwise you won't get a proper fix on your surroundings via your hearing. So your brain compensates by 'hyper listening'.

Then when you abruptly remove the cause of the deafness, your brain is still in that 'hyper listening' mode, so, everything sounds extremely loud.
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But that's a very temporary effect. I experience it every day..
 
@Enmos: But say you had regular sessions where you would mute your senses. If you got the length of time right I'm sure you could maintain heightened senses.

I still have hyperhearing today, though it is not so extreme.

@Dr Mabuse: so do you know of other ways you can heighten your senses? I'd love to know.
 
visceral_instinct said:
@Enmos: But say you had regular sessions where you would mute your senses. If you got the length of time right I'm sure you could maintain heightened senses.

I still have hyperhearing today, though it is not so extreme.
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Somehow I doubt it. But why would you want that anyway ?
 
I remember reading about a man who wore lenses to make everything upside down. After a while his brain compensated and everything was back to normal.

When he took off the lenses his vision was upside down, and again had to adjust.
 
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