Do You Have Trouble Hearing People Talk In Noisy Environment? New Study Finds A Remarkably Simple Trick May Help.

Shutterstock

Have you ever noticed that when you are in a noisy environment, some people seem to be able to have conversations easily and others really struggle? This could be at a bar, a house party, or anywhere that there is a lot of noise (whether it is music, other conversations, or something else). This can be very frustrating to people who have trouble picking out specific conversations out of all the background noise.

Many people simply avoid going to parties or other loud environments because they are all but unable to carry on a conversation because of this issue. In some cases, the problem is associated with hearing loss or some type of auditory processing disorder, which should be addressed with a doctor. If the person’s hearing is fine outside of these environments, however, a new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B may offer a solution, and it is so simple that anyone can do it.

The study looked at how physical movement and keeping a beat can actually help your brain pick out the desired conversation and ignore the background noise much more effectively. In the paper, the team writes:

“Listening to speech activates cortical regions of the sensorimotor system. Their role in linguistic processing has been highly investigated, but their putative role in the analysis of the temporal dynamics of the speech signal has been mostly overlooked. However, studies on speech perception in adverse listening conditions – such as a noisy or multi-talker environment – show that tracking the temporal modulations of the speech signal of a speaker of interest facilitates speech comprehension.”

Shutterstock

The study took the participants and had them listen to 80 sentences that were relatively long that were played over  background noise. The participants were then given a list of words and asked to identify which word on the list was spoken in that sentence after hearing it once. The study explains what happened:

“Participants were presented a white fixation cross (0.5 s) indicating the start of the trial, after which they heard an audible prime beat. They were instructed to, as quickly as possible, synchronize to the auditory beat by pressing the spacebar of the keyboard with their index finger. Periodic prime beats were presented for 5 s at either the phrasal (~1.1 Hz, s.d. = 0.15), lexical (~1.8 Hz, s.d. = 0.23) or syllabic (~5.0 Hz, s.d. = 0.33) rate of the upcoming sentence.”

There was also a control group in the study who were not asked to tap the spacebar at all. The participants were told to do the tapping of the spacebar before hearing the sentence and not during so that it would not be a distraction.

Almost surprisingly, the people who tapped out the rhythm before listening got the correct answer more often, as long as they tapped at the right rate. They explain:

“Here we show that the beneficial effect of a generic periodic prime on speech comprehension is strongest at a frequency of approximately 1.5−2 Hz. This observed rate-selectivity at the lexical rate rules out the possibility that the facilitation is driven by nonspecific arousal or motor preparation effects.”

For those who want to try this trick themself, that simply means tapping at a rate of 1.5-2 times per second. It does not seem to matter whether you are tapping on a keyboard’s spacebar, a table, or your own leg. The simple act of tapping is something most people will be able to do discreetly so it likely won’t even be noticed by others in the conversation.

Shutterstock

This study was done using the French language, but the researchers believe the same rate of tapping will work with any language, though additional research is needed to confirm.

If this actually works, it could be life changing for many people.

If you think that’s impressive, check out this story about a “goldmine” of lithium that was found in the U.S. that could completely change the EV battery game.