In noisy places, keeping your eyes open can help you hear better than closing them.
Many people believe that closing your eyes sharpens your hearing, but this is not always true. In noisy environments, participants had more difficulty hearing faint sounds with their eyes closed, while visual stimuli correspondents made the task easier.
In a new study, researchers found that closing your eyes causes the brain to excessively filter sounds received. Keeping your eyes open can actually improve hearing ability in noisy environments.
When people try to concentrate on a faint sound, many instinctively close their eyes. The common belief is that remove visual distractions allows the brain to focus more fully on hearing, increasing sensitivity.
However, This approach doesn’t always workespecially in environments full of background noise.
The , recently published in JASA, proposed testing whether closing your eyes actually improves hearing in noisy conditions. Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University examined how visual stimulation affects the ability to detect sounds.
Participants in the studyheard a variety of sounds through headphones while at the same time being background noise played. Their task was to adjust the volume until each sound was just audible above the noise.
The experience iincluded various visual conditions. First, participants completed the task with their eyes closed.
Then, they repeated it with their eyes open while looking at a blank screen, followed by viewing a still image related to the sound and, finally, watching a video that corresponded to what they were hearing.
Close your eyes vs. visual stimuli
The results contradicted a widely held assumption. “We found that, contrary to popular belief, closing your eyes actually impairs your ability to detect these sounds,” he says. Yu Huang, corresponding author of the study, cited by .
“Inversely, watch a dynamic video corresponding to the sound results in a significant improvement in hearing sensitivity“, he adds.
Instead of helping, closing the eyes made it more difficult to distinguish faint sounds in noisy environments, while relevant visual stimuli provided a clear advantage.
To understand why this happens, researchers used electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor brain activity during tests.
They discovered that closing your eyes changes the brain to a state known as neural criticalitywhich increases the intensity with which it filters the information received.
This intensified filtering not only reduces background noise. You can also suppress target sounds that participants are trying to hear.
“In a noisy soundscape, the brain needs to actively separate the signal from the background,” Huang said. “We found that the internal focus promoted by eye closure actually works against us in this context, leading to excessive filtering, while visual engagement helps anchor the auditory system to the outside world.”
The researchers noted that the effect appears specific for noisy environments. In quieter conditions, closing your eyes can even improve your ability to detect subtle sounds.
However, since everyday life often involves significant background noise, Keeping your eyes open may be the most effective strategy in many situations.
