Eye and ear

The sense organs complement each other

The five classical senses of the human being are assigned to specific sensory organs or body parts: hearing to the ears, seeing to the eyes, smelling to the nose, tasting to the tongue and feeling to the fingertips.

The human senses do not work in isolation from each other, but complement each other. Thus, when tasting, the impressions of the taste buds on the tongue are combined with those of the olfactory mucosa in the nose. And when hearing, eyes and ears often work together.

Eye and ear - the connections were discovered more by chance

Harry McGurk (1936 to 1998) was a British psychologist who specialized in the study of human information processing. As a lecturer at the University of Surrey in the 1970s, he studied the language development of children. For testing purposes, his team dubbed video recordings with new audio recordings and accidentally discovered that a number of people did not understand either the originally spoken or the newly dubbed sound, but a third. The researchers investigated the phenomenon in more detail.1 To do this, they played a video to test subjects in which one person says the sounds "ga ga". However, the test persons heard the sound "ba ba" over the audio track. Result: Almost always (to 98 percent) the test subjects understood the sounds "da da". The reason for this is, according to the conclusion of McGurk and his colleagues, that the brain processes the auditory information together with the optical impressions. This can influence perception.

The McGurk Effect is regarded as the scientific proof of the neurological cooperation of eye and ear. Even if humans understand spoken words without visual impressions, perception and processing are better if the brain can combine the sensory impressions. A person with a hearing loss may be able to compensate for this by the visual impressions. Has the interviewer already finished his sentence? How does what he or she hears match the facial expressions and gestures of the other person? A form of unconscious lip reading is developed.

Signs of hearing loss?

If you feel that you can only understand the person you are talking to when you can look them in the face, you don't have to assume that you have hearing loss. The person you are talking to may only speak softly and unclearly. Or the background noise is simply too loud, for example in a dance club. But that should not be a reason for not taking these signs seriously. If in doubt, it is always advisable to have your hearing checked by a doctor or hearing aid specialist.

_{¹ McGurk H, MacDonald J: Hearing lips and seeing voices, in: Nature volume 264, pages 746-748 (23 December 1976)}