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.