How My Skin Hear

Skin heard? It sounds absurd, but a new study proves, humans not only hear with your ears, but also through the skin.

The findings are based on the experiment. Experiment participants were asked to listen to any syllable air blowing on their skin, and their brains will receive and integrate information from different senses to create a picture of the situation around.

Together with other work recently, the research throws the traditional view of how people interpret the world in their heads.

"(It) is very different from more traditional opinion, which is based on the fact that we have eyes so we think we are seeing the visible information, and we have ears so we thought ourselves to hear the information that can be heard. That's a bit misleading," Researchers said the study Gick Bryan from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, to the writer Jeanna Bryner LiveScience

"The more likely explanation is that we have a brain and not feel we have eyes that see and ears that hear." With such capabilities, Gick sees man as "sensitive machines throughout the body," Bryner said livescience.com pages.

The study, funded by the "Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada" and "National Institutes of Health", specified in the journal Nature, published 26 November.

Gick's work is built on a variety of past studies showing, for example, "we can see the light and heard a voice", even if we knew it by accident. Other studies show "if you watch someone's lips moving and thought someone else was talking, the sense of hearing in the area of your brain will glow," Gick said.

Many scientists have explained the bow of such sensing as a result of experience, "when we see and hear people talk all the time so naturally to know how to integrate what we see with what we heard".

The choice will be the ability traits. And thus Gick and his partner Donald Derrick, who is also from the University of Brititsh Columbia, studied the two senses are not generally in pairs - hearing and touch - to find out the base of perception.



How skin heard

The team focused on the spoken voice with the blast, such as "pa" and "ta" which involves a blast of air that can not be heard when spoken, and unspoken voices in blast, such as "ba" and "da".

Participants who closed his eyes listening to the recorded voice told him that each of the four syllables and have to press buttons to indicate which sound they hear ( "pa, ta, ba, or da").

All participants were divided to three groups comprising 22 people, and one group listening while syllables blowing air is forced into their hands, the other air blown into their neck, and the monitors listening to the sound without blowing air.

As many as 10 percent of the time when the air exhaled into the skin, all participants received erroneously spoken syllables without blowing the same air as that spoken by the air blast. So, when people say "ba", participants will indicate they heard the sound "pa".

Monitoring groups showed no such misperception.

A further experiment when participants tapped the skin and not get a breath of air showed no mixed between the spoken voice with and without blowing air.

Next, Gick collaboration with scientists from the University of California, San Francisco, to find out how the brain allowing the integration of many such senses.(AntaraNews)