Since I was a child, the third grade to be exact, I have had glasses. Every doctor visit, my vision gets worse. I have been wearing contacts since the fifth grade and can honestly say that without them, I would almost be blind (yes I have 50/20 vision which is pretty high up there). From time to time I get asked the question “can you hear well?” because apparently there is the idea that if you have very bad eyesight that you have really good hearing, and vise versa. I’ve always wondered if this was something for all people like me with bad eyesight, so I decided to do some research.
While there are little to no studies done on this topic, or at least that I could find, I was able to find one study on this issue of hearing and seeing. In this small study, conducted by Franco Lepore and his colleagues, they tested to see if those who were blind were better able to locate sound than those who could see perfectly fine. He used nineteen participants, seven who were able to see normally and twelve who had gone blind at a very early age in their life. During their experiment, all participants were put into an “echo-free chamber” and asked to locate where a sound was coming from. This might remind you of hearing tests that would take place in elementary school, where the nurse would put headphones on you and you would have to state which side the noise was coming from. This test was a little different however, because there were more than just two spots to choose where a sound was coming from. The participants were tested on locating the sounds with just one ear and also both.
After conducting the experiment, the results showed that all participants, both blind and those who could see had no trouble detecting the sounds when both ears were used. However, five of the blind participants (five out of twelve) were able to locate the sounds correctly with one ear. The results also stated that “most” of the normal visioned participants could not spot any of the sounds.
These results are very vague. To begin with, the amount of participants in the study is extremely small. Also, when stating that the normal visioned participants could not spot any of the sounds, they did not state a specific amount, they just said “most”. This is not very reliable data which makes it hard to determine if the conclusions made by the experiment are valid or not.
After looking over this, I still am unsure if better vision comes with worse hearing or vise versa; maybe it does. This experiment gave small insight to it, but there is just not enough data to prove it. For now, I’ll stick with my glasses and contacts and hope that I wont need a hearing aid in the future.
This was a very interesting post. If you’re looking for other sources on this topic, I would look Scientific American’s explanation of why blind people have better hearing. This blog explains cross-modal neuroplasticity, which is how the brain develops to fit its experiences, and why blind people are more likely to hear better.
This is very interesting to me, I too have very poor vision but I never really thought about my hearing. I guess it would make sense in theory, but only if your vision was bad and you had no correctional tools to help it. Blind people are forced to be very attentive to their other senses because of this, and that may make a difference. Perhaps it is not the ability to hear itself, but the ability to focus on one sense. There is also another interesting topic that I am thinking about doing a blog on, it is about people who can see colors when they hear music. Check it out! http://www.livescience.com/169-rare-real-people-feel-taste-hear-color.html
I think this is a very good topic, because I have always thought the same thing when constantly going back to the doctors for my yearly check up with my eyes. I have never understood why it is said we have better hearing, but I have always tried to tell myself that it kind of does make sense. This study does give a small insight which is interesting, but i do wish there was more scientific research done on the topic. It would be even more interesting to know a study was proven that we do hear better. That would be a plus side to having glasses for me!