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.