Experiment #5: Hearing (Ankur & Akshat)

Background Information:

Brain plasticity is when different parts of the brain create passages to each other. If you have an impairment, such as deafness, your seeing might be better than normal people because the passages go more to the other part of the brain rather than the hearing part. This enhances other parts of the body and allows those with impaired senses to compensate for their lack of hearing, sight, etc. In our previous experiment, the person who had impaired hearing memorized 96 words out of 155 while the person whose senses were normal only memorized 78 out of 155 words. This is a small sample size, but shows the benefits of sensory deprivation. In order to gain a true conclusion, we must do this experiment multiple times.

Question:

Can impairing different senses enable students to retain information better?

Specific Experiment Question:

Can taking away ones hearing enhance their concentration and ability to memorize?

Hypothesis:

If brain plasticity occurs for any sense and taking away ones sight and hearing in previous experiments allows for an increase in memorization, then the person whose sense of hearing was taken away will be more successful at memorizing the piece given due to having less distractions and their other senses being enhanced.

Procedure:

One person will block their ears and read and one person will read with all senses there. They will read and try to memorize a paragraph for 10 minutes, and then they will recite the paragraph again to see how much each person memorized.

Piece to be Memorized:

"One reason people lie is to achieve personal power. Achieving personal power is helpful for someone who pretends to be more confident than he really is. For example, one of my friends threw a party at his house last month. He asked me to come to his party and bring a date. However, I didn’t have a girlfriend. One of my other friends, who had a date to go to the party with, asked me about my date. I didn’t want to be embarrassed, so I claimed that I had a lot of work to do. I said I could easily find a date even better than his if I wanted to. I also told him that his date was ugly. I achieved power to help me feel confident; however, I embarrassed my friend and his date. Although this lie helped me at the time, since then it has made me look down on myself."

Results:

- Impaired Sense (Ankur): 104 out of 155

- Non-Impaired (Akshat): 73 out of 155

Closing Thoughts:

The results from this test have had a major impact on our current conclusion. The results validate our previous data and show that impaired hearing can in fact help people memorize content more efficiently and with more concentration. We had hoped to run this test multiple times but will have to be content with 2 tests. Compiled with our conclusion for our sight test, and we have efficiently

Experiment #4: Sight (Andrew & Sasha)

Background Information:

Brain plasticity is when different parts of the brain create passages to each other. If you have an impairment, such as deafness, your seeing might be better than normal people because the passages go more to the other part of the brain rather than the hearing part. This enhances other parts of the body and allows those with impaired senses to compensate for their lack of hearing, sight, etc. In our previous experiment, the person who had impaired sight memorized 47 seconds of the song while the person whose senses were normal only memorized 39 seconds of the song. This is a small sample size, but shows the benefits of sensory deprivation. In order to gain a true conclusion, we must do this experiment multiple times

Question:

Can impairing different senses enable students to retain information better?

Specific Experiment Question:

Can taking away ones sight enhance their concentration and ability to memorize?

Hypothesis:

If brain plasticity occurs for any sense and taking away ones sight and hearing in previous experiments allows for an increase in memorization, then the person whose sense of sight was taken away will be more successful at memorizing the piece given due to having less distractions and their other senses being enhanced.

Procedure: 

One person will cover their eyes and listen while one person will listen with all senses there. They will listen and try to memorize the lyrics from a portion of the song for 10 minutes, and then they will recite the lyrics again to see how much each person memorized. We will measure the amount memorized and come to a conclusion based upon multiple experiments.

Piece to be Memorized:

4u by Blackbear
From 0:00 - 1:00

Results:

Impaired Seeing (Gao): 53 seconds of the song

Non- Impaired (Sasha): 29 seconds of the song

Closing Thoughts:
The results from this test have had a major impact on our current conclusion. The results validate our previous data and show that impaired sight can in fact help people memorize content more efficiently and with more concentration. We had hoped to run this test multiple times but will have to be content with 2 tests. In the very near future we plan on running our hearing test again to see weather it corroborates our current data data conclusion.

Experiment #3: Smell

Background Information:

Brain plasticity is when different parts of the brain create passages to each other. If you have an impairment, such as deafness, your seeing might be better than normal people because the passages go more to the other part of the brain rather than the hearing part. This enhances other parts of the body and allows those with impaired senses to compensate for their lack of hearing, sight, etc. In our previous experiment, the person who had impaired hearing memorized 96 of the 155 word paragraph, while the person whose senses were normal only memorized 78 of the 155 words. This is a small sample size, but shows the benefits of sensory deprivation.

Question:

Can impairing different senses enable students to retain information better?

Specific Experiment Question:

Can taking away ones smell enhance their concentration and ability to memorize?

Hypothesis:

If brain plasticity occurs for any sense and taking away ones hearing and sight allows for an increase in memorization and concentration in certain cases, then the person whose sense of smell was taken away will be more successful at memorizing the piece given due to having less distractions and their other senses being enhanced.

Procedure: 

One person will block their nose by putting cotton balls up inside of them. Next, both individuals will read the speech below. They will read and try to memorize the lines from a portion of the speech for 10 minutes, and then they will recite the lines again to see how much each person memorized. We will measure the amount memorized and come to a conclusion based upon multiple experiments.

Piece to be Memorized:
Rocky Balboa Speech:
"You ain’t gonna believe this, but you used to fit right here.

I’d hold you up to say to your mother, “This kid’s gonna be the best kid in the world. This kid’s gonna be somebody better than anybody I ever knew.” And you grew up good and wonderful. It was great just watching you, every day was like a privilege. Then the time come for you to be your own man and take on the world, and you did. But somewhere along the line, you changed. You stopped being you. You let people stick a finger in your face and tell you you’re no good. And when things got hard, you started looking for something to blame, like a big shadow.

Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done! Now if you know what you’re worth then go out and get what you’re worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain’t you! You’re better than that!"

Results:

Person with nose blocked: 91 words
Person with nose clear: 122 words

Closing Thoughts:

We see here that the impairment of smell does not affect memorization skills. In fact the student that didn't have their nose blocked memorized more. One possible reason for this is that smelling certain scents release chemicals that stimulate the brain. Also this is the final step towards our goal, as we have finished each experiment that we have planned on. We have learned that the impairment of hearing and seeing when you are studying will help you memorize more, although you have to it one at a time. You cannot do both of those impairments together. Also, we learned that smelling certain scents may help stimulate your brain and help you learn easier. However, none of these are fully proven as we dd not take into account the personal health, mental health, or the physical health of each of our test subjects. However, we did fine information that could get is very close to answering our original question of whether impairment helps students retain information better.

Update #4

We have finished our 3rd experiment and have come to a basis for our conclusion. Based upon our tests, depriving one of their hearing and sight helps memorization, while during our smell experiment, we had differing results, as the person with clear senses did better in the test than the person with impaired smell. Though this could be caused by many different factors, it contrasts greatly to our other tests. We now plan on using to people for our tests and plan on repeating them to come to conclusive results.

Update #3

The results of our tests have been supportive towards a true conclusion. The results of our tests were:

• Hearing
• Impaired Sense: 96 words out of 155
• Non-Impaired: 78 out of 155 words

• Sight
• Impaired Sense: 47 seconds of the song
• Non- Impaired: 39 seconds of the song

We will be finishing our 3rd test and plan on having more test subjects take our tests. once we come to a more definite conclusion, we will implement our idea into our everyday life.

Experiment #2: Sight

Background Information:

Brain plasticity is when different parts of the brain create passages to each other. If you have an impairment, such as deafness, your seeing might be better than normal people because the passages go more to the other part of the brain rather than the hearing part. This enhances other parts of the body and allows those with impaired senses to compensate for their lack of hearing, sight, etc. In our previous experiment, the person who had impaired hearing memorized 96 of the 155 word paragraph, while the person whose senses were normal only memorized 78 of the 155 words. This is a small sample size, but shows the benefits of sensory deprivation.

Question:

Can impairing different senses enable students to retain information better?

Specific Experiment Question:

Can taking away ones sight enhance their concentration and ability to memorize?

Hypothesis:

If brain plasticity occurs for any sense and taking away ones hearing allows for an increase in memorization, then the person whose sense of sight was taken away will be more successful at memorizing the piece given due to having less distractions and their other senses being enhanced.

Procedure: 

One person will cover their eyes and listen while one person will listen with all senses there. They will listen and try to memorize the lyrics from a portion of the song for 10 minutes, and then they will recite the lyrics again to see how much each person memorized. We will measure the amount memorized and come to a conclusion based upon multiple experiments.

Piece to be Memorized:

4u by Blackbear
From 0:00 - 1:00

Results:

Impaired Seeing: 47 seconds of the song

Non- Impaired: 39 seconds of the song

From this, there are many possibilities. One is that impaired sight helps you memorize better. Another is that the person with impaired sight was a much better memorizer then the other and the impaired sight didn’t affect their ability at all. Yet another possibility was that one might have been having a better day then the other or other factors that we can’t see. We will test more to see which one of these possibilities it actually was.  

Closing Thoughts:
One challenge with this experiment was having two people who didn’t have any background of the song whatsoever. Some more people are more musically inclined and respond differently to different types of music. This may have affected our data and is a precaution we should take in future experiments, which is to find people who are of equal understanding on the topic and who are of equal learning abilities.

Update #2

In the past 2 weeks, we started to make our experiments to test. Our first experiment will consist of blocking the sense of hearing to try and memorize a paragraph we are given. One person will wear noise cancelling headphones and the other will have all their senses intact. We will see if one person can memorize more then another. We then made another experiment consisting of blocking the sense of seeing. One person will cover their eyes and the other will not and they will try to memorize the first minute of 4u by Blackbear. If the results are consistent for these experiments, we could be starting to look at a potential conclusion. Our next steps are carrying out these experiments and making a few more.