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.