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