Closing your eyes might not help you hear better after all

(Press-News.org) WASHINGTON, March 17, 2026 — Most people will close their eyes when trying to concentrate on a faint sound. Many of us have been told that keeping our eyes closed helps us hear better — that it frees up our brains’ processing abilities and increases our auditory sensitivity. However, that strategy may sometimes backfire, particularly in environments with a lot of loud background noise.

In JASA, published on behalf of the Acoustical Society of America by AIP Publishing, researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University tested whether a person closing their eyes can really hear better in noisy environments.

To test this, volunteers listened to a collection of sounds through headphones amid background noise. Then, the volunteers adjusted the volume of the sounds until they could barely make them out over the background noise.

This test was conducted first with eyes closed, then with eyes open but looking at only a blank screen, then looking at a still picture corresponding to the sound, and finally, looking at a video matching up with the sound they were trying to hear.

“We found that, contrary to popular belief, closing one’s eyes actually impairs the ability to detect these sounds,” said author Yu Huang. “Conversely, seeing a dynamic video corresponding to the sound significantly improves hearing sensitivity.”

To find an explanation for this result, the researchers attached electroencephalography (EEG) devices to the participants to monitor their brain activity. They determined that closing the eyes puts a participant’s brain in a state of neural criticality, which more aggressively filters noises and quiet sounds, including the target sounds those participants were trying to detect.

“In a noisy soundscape, the brain needs to actively separate the signal from the background,” said Huang. “We found that the internal focus promoted by eye closure actually works against you in this context, leading to over-filtering, whereas visual engagement helps anchor the auditory system to the external world.”

The authors emphasize that this result is unique to noisy environments. With a calmer background, the conventional strategy of keeping their eyes closed likely does help people detect faint sounds. But because so much of our lives are spent surrounded by noise, it might be better to face the world with eyes wide open.

The researchers plan to continue their work exploring the relationship between vision and hearing.

“Specifically, we want to test incongruent pairings — for example, what happens if you hear a drum but see a bird?” said Huang. “Does the visual boost come from simply having the eyes open and processing more visual information, or does the brain require the visual and audio information to match perfectly? Understanding this distinction will help us separate the general effects of attention from the specific benefits of multisensory integration.”

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The article “Visual engagement modulates cortical criticality and auditory target detection thresholds in noisy soundscapes” is authored by Ke Ni, Yu Huang, Yi Wei, and Xu Zhang. It will appear in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America on March 17, 2026 (DOI: 10.1121/10.0042380). After that date, it can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0042380.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) is published on behalf of the Acoustical Society of America. Since 1929, the journal has been the leading source of theoretical and experimental research results in the broad interdisciplinary subject of sound. JASA serves physical scientists, life scientists, engineers, psychologists, physiologists, architects, musicians, and speech communication specialists. See https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa.

ABOUT THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA

The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is the premier international scientific society in acoustics devoted to the science and technology of sound. Its 7,000 members worldwide represent a broad spectrum of the study of acoustics. ASA publications include The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (the world’s leading journal on acoustics), JASA Express Letters, Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, Acoustics Today magazine, books, and standards on acoustics. The society also holds two major scientific meetings each year. See https://acousticalsociety.org/.

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