Once the heart rate got over 175, hearing diminished. Then the participants were put on a treadmill and the hearing test continued as the heart rate increased (simulating the heart rate increase under stress). I recall reading one research study where participants were hooked up to an audiometer to test their base-level hearing. Physically, all the right parts are moving and taking in the sound waves but something can happen to diminish their processing. During my research, one of my firefighter participants described this phenomenon as if they were hearing the teacher on a Peanuts cartoon.ĭuring a high stress event the ears are working just fine… sort of. If the audible cortex is still functioning but its acuity is turned down, the person may describe the sounds they hear as muffled or distant. It may be turned off completely! Hence the word exclusion. In the presence of high-stress visual stimulation, the processing of audible information may be dulled. This means the visual cortex and the audible cortex have to share resources or, in some cases, take turns processing information. (NOTE: The subconscious brain, on the other hand, is a wonderful multitasker.) Unfortunately, we see and hear with our conscious brains. One lesson has been our understanding that the conscious brain is a horrible multitasker. Some pretty cool things have resulted from this technology. While training and techniques to control stress can prevent the severity of the response, make no mistake about it, once the hormonal dump occurs, you are no longer in control of the consequences.įunctional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans allow researchers to peer inside the brain, non-evasively, to see how the brain is functioning during the process of thinking and making decisions.
Auditory illusions cause series#
The physical and psychological responses to stress have been well-documented and summarized in the previous segments of this series so I won’t rehash them here. Most has been done with the military Some with law enforcement Very little with firefighters or EMS. There have been multiple research studies conducted on the impact of stress on hearing over the past 20 years. auditory exclusion) is far less known, but every bit as dangerous. Most firefighters and emergency responders are aware of tunneled vision because they were taught about it in their basic fire training program or perhaps in a medical training program.
This is an important consequence of stress that can have tremendous implications for situational awareness so I want to spend some additional time with it. In the last segment I shared with you some of the ill-effects stress can have on vision and I made brief reference to a term that may be new to many readers – auditory exclusion. Welcome to Part 6 of the Understanding Stress series.
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