Human Skin is our "Third Ear"

I found an interesting article that refutes the idea that our sense of hearing works alone. When we perceive the audible acoustics around us, air puffs against the skin can alter sounds slightly. The idea is similar to how we can use our eyes to interpret facial expressions and other cues to form conclusions about the emotions or subject of our verbal conversations.

The people who made this observation, professor Bryan Gick from the Department of Linguistics, University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada and PhD student Donald Derrick, affirm that tactile information plays an ever increasing role in our senses. A little knowledge of the English language became the basis of their study. Small and subtle differences in the way air bursts through our lips makes a difference in word meanings. Because our language relies so heavily on certain syllables being aspirated, 66 men and women recruited for the study reported differences in perception of words from what was actually spoken when air puffs were applied to the skin. As puffs touched the neck or right hand of the subject, eight repetitions of an assortment of syllables were heard. The subjects were then more likely to perceive them as aspirated syllables, for instance they heard "ba" as "pa" and "da" as "ta". A difference in their study versus other studies of tactile input is that these patients are integrating “naturalistic tactile information during auditory speech perception without previous training".

The two men hope that their findings will pave the way for new hearing aids, speech science research, telecommunications, and new approaches to multi-sensory speech perception.

I’m not quite sure what it is about the skin or the air puffs that influence our hearing so intricately. The article was not clear on the exact physiological mechanism that captures these air puffs and translates them into signals that change auditory perception. I’m also skeptical as to the validity of the test. The article did not give much in terms of details. We do not know the role that language plays in the sensitivity of our hearing to these air puffs or the effect of environmental controls. We do not have the statistics of the experiment, so the experiment is hard to evaluate. However, I thought the article was interesting because it makes us seem more interesting. The fact is that the clearly defined territories of our 5 main senses that we all know are not so distinct and final as we once thought. It is a marvel that our bodies have the ability to perceive small details such as air puffs to sense our environment.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/172341.php

Jason Dwight
Section 502