Using smartphones can cause temporary deafness

Focusing your sight on a mobile device screen may prevent you from hearing sound warnings.

You may experience temporary deafness when using a smartphone

According to a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, focusing high-level vision on the phone screen can make people temporarily unable to hear any noise around.

When our eyes focus on the screen of devices to search for directions, talking or reading the newspaper will cause the hearing to forget existing sounds.

The human brain can only process some information at the same time . When our eyes focus on the screen of devices to find directions, chatting or reading the newspaper will make the hearing forget the sound that exists . That's why you don't hear anyone talking or sound warnings such as car horns, motorcycles .

Some psychologists call this a temporary deaf symptom , when the human brain ignores the sound information generated around it. "Temporary deafness has become more and more popular in today's society and we have explained its cause , " said Professor Nilli Lavie of the British Institute of Cognitive and Neuroscience Research in a report. my science.

"For example, if you try to talk to someone who is highly focused on reading books, playing games or TV shows and they do not respond or respond to you, simply because they do not hear at all. what " . This also explains why we cannot hear horns and horns when we are using the phone.

Professor Lavie and his team of researchers conducted tests on 13 volunteers. These people will wear headphones that are randomly sounded while they are having to complete the "visual mission" : press the keyboard of the computer keyboard that appears on the screen. Each volunteer is connected to the brain scanner during testing.

With simple exercises, volunteers still recognize the sound coming from the headphones. But the level of difficulty of the test increased gradually so that they had to concentrate heavily on the "visual mission" , the brain scanner showed very little brain response was recorded. Analyzing the results these people almost did not hear anything.

This phenomenon is one of the factors that interfere with human communication.

This study is only in a small area that cannot say anything, but its theoretical framework is based on the scientific report of Professor Lavie and his colleagues on the phenomenon of temporary blindness (when people see everything but Do not visualize or forget those images if distracted).

Temporary deafness is a pretty harmless phenomenon but it will make people who face us feel uncomfortable when they are trying to communicate with you. Professor Lavie said: "Our research shows the limitations of the human brain in specific situations."

He offers situations that show the danger of this phenomenon: the surgeon focuses on the surgery without hearing an emergency alarm, the pedestrian stares at the phone without hearing Bicycle bell . Previous research has also shown that many pilots do not notify the control center when they are experiencing an emergency situation.