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.

Experiment #1: Hearing

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.

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 hearing allows for less distractions, 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 (hearing): 96 words out of 155

- All senses there:  78 out of 155 words

From this, there are many possibilities. One is that impaired hearing helps you memorize better. Another is that the person with impaired hearing was a much better memorizer then the other and the impaired hearing 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:

This could be our first hint for an answer to our main question. The person who blocked their hearing memorized more of the paragraph, which gives us an indication that we may be inching towards an answer of yes to our question. However, since their was a very minor change, we must continue to test in order to create a true conclusion with a large amount of supportive data.

Update #1: Sensory Deprivation Learning

20 Time is an idea in which people are allowed 20% of their work time to work on any project of their choosing that they are passionate about. It is used in many companies such as Google and even in Saratoga High School. Many great projects and inventions are created from 20 time because it allows people to work on projects they truly care about, such as in our case where we are trying to find an innovative way to learn through testing sensory deprivation. In biology class, everyone is doing 20 time projects that they care about can have an effect on the lives of other people.

Brain plasticity is when different parts of the brain create passages to each other. If you have an impairment, such as deafness, you're 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. This might help us academically because if we want to say memorize a paragraph, and say our ears are blocked, we may be able to memorize it better or faster because there are less distraction around us and the passages between our eyes and other cells may grow, enhancing our eyes and allowing us to learn better. To see whether we can use this to our academic advantage and enhance our learning abilities we are asking the question of: Can impairing different senses enable students to retain information better?

We have chosen this question because we believe answering it can truly help the learning process for all people and expand learning abilities. If our prediction over this test is correct, it will yield a whole new way of studying that can shape our intelligence and learning prospects. In order to answer this question, we will create a set of experiments that test the impairment of different senses and learning types, such as visual and auditory. We will find test subjects and give them task to accomplish, with one subject unaltered, while the other will have a non used sense impaired. All other factors will be the same for both subjects, including their environment and visual conditions.

Our goal is to create as many experiments as possible with as many different senses on as many people as possible to gain the largest amount of information. We can use this information to come to a clear answer for our question and formulate into a solution that can help the current learning process. Each week, will create and test a new experiment, and collect information in a quantitative way through the usage of memorization and quizzes.

We hope you like our project and hope to gain insight on any recommendations you have on how to improve it.