New research says people can hear with their skin

According to new research, people can also hear with their skin. Dr. Bryan Gick and his team at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, sought to determine if tactile sensations could affect hearing.

In there study involving 22 people, they found that inaudible puffs of air delivered alongside certain sounds influenced what participants thought they were listening to. There research may lead to better aids for the hard of hearing, experts said.

The study participants were more likely to recognize aspirated syllables correctly when they heard those syllables when receiving slight, inaudible air puffs to the skin, the team report in the Nov. 26 Nature. Air puffs enhanced detection of aspirated ta and pa sounds and increased the likelihood of mishearing non-aspirated da and ba sounds as their aspirated counterparts, the researchers say.

Dr Bryan Gick said his team would now work to create a hearing aid using the findings from their study.

“All we need is a pneumatic device that can produce air puffs aimed at the neck at the right times based on acoustic input into the hearing aid, and then a set of experiments to test the efficacy.” Dr Bryan Gick said.

“What’s so persuasive about this particular effect,” he added, “is that people are picking up on this information that they don’t know they are using.” That supports the idea that integrating different sensory cues is innate.

One Response to “New research says people can hear with their skin”

1. enaya says:

   thAmerica/Chicagop30America/Chicago11bAmerica/ChicagoSat, 28 Nov 2009 14:33:44 -0600 1, 2008 at 2:33 pm

   people feel through their skin,when i hear music that touches my heart i get goose bumps so every thing is connected. My husband’s father was a surgeon, he used to say that intelligence is in the finger tips. I myself always thought that the heart has a main part in the human being feelings, of course i am not a scientist or a doctor I’m an ordinary human being that thinks there are a lot of things we have not yet discovered, for example i feel love,fear,excitement and the cold breeze through my skin and my heart. Well i am so happy that finally Dr.Bryan Gick is thinking and discovering new things in the world of medicine.