Weird as it may sound, people become temporarily deaf several times a day, most especially during times that they are glancing on their phones or scrolling through the posts on their Instagram account. According to a recent study, when these instances occur, people become deaf to normal-volume sounds around thme. This phenomenon is known as inattentional deafness.
Yes, this study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience showed that when you are focusing on a visual task, you are rendered deaf at that moment, albeit temporarily. So, you cannot hear normal sounds like the conversation of other friends seated at the same round table.
According to Yahoo News, University College London researchers conducted a study on 13 volunteers. They analyzed the brain activity of these volunteers on real time as they go about completing visual tasks. While working on the tasks, other sounds were being played around them.
Based on the brain activity of the volunteers, the harder the tasks get, activity on the part of the brain that responds to sound was also reduced. This was explained by Maria Chait, Ph.D. She said that, "The brain scans showed that people were not only ignoring or filtering out the sounds, they were not actually hearing them in the first place." She concluded that the resources of vision and hearing in the brain are limited and shared.
Another author of the study, Nilli Lavie, Ph.D. said that this phenomenon called inattentional deafness is the reason why your children can't hear you telling them something whenever they are glued to the TV. Another example is when you're engrossed in a book and you can't hear people talking to you.
In a report by Medical Daily, Lavie mentioned that, "This has more serious implications in situations such as the operating theater, where a surgeon concentrating on their work might not hear the equipment beeping," Inattentional deafness can be applied to any situation where one's visual focus is glued on something, making his hearing less attentive to sounds around him.
