Does Darkness Make Your Hearing More Sensitive?

Check out this answer from Consensus:

The evidence suggests that darkness does not necessarily make hearing more sensitive in a straightforward manner. While light conditions might improve certain auditory thresholds, darkness appears to enhance the startle reflex due to affective responses rather than increased auditory sensitivity. Further research is needed to fully understand the interplay between environmental conditions and sensory modalities.

The relationship between sensory modalities and environmental conditions has long intrigued researchers. One such area of interest is the effect of darkness on auditory sensitivity. This article explores whether darkness enhances hearing sensitivity by examining findings from recent studies.

Effects of Darkness on Auditory Sensitivity

Absolute and Masked Thresholds

A study investigating the effects of darkness and light on auditory sensitivity measured the absolute threshold, differential threshold, and masked threshold for a 1200 cycles per second tone in 46 subjects. The results indicated a small but reliable improvement in both absolute and masked thresholds in the presence of light, suggesting that light conditions might slightly enhance auditory sensitivity. However, no change was observed in the differential threshold, indicating that the ability to discern differences in sound intensity remained constant regardless of lighting conditions1.

Acoustic Startle Reflex

Another study focused on the acoustic startle reflex in humans under conditions of complete darkness and light. The study involved 25 subjects and found that darkness significantly increased the magnitude of the startle response. Interestingly, the prepulse inhibition (PPI) was not affected by darkness, suggesting that the increased startle response was not due to heightened attention to auditory stimuli. Instead, the increased startle response in darkness was correlated with the subjects' childhood fear of the dark, implying that the change in startle reflex might be more related to affective factors rather than sensory sensitivity2.

Discussion

The findings from these studies present a nuanced view of how darkness affects auditory sensitivity. While one study suggests that light conditions might slightly improve auditory thresholds, another indicates that darkness can enhance the startle reflex, potentially due to emotional factors rather than sensory changes. These results highlight the complexity of sensory processing and the influence of environmental and psychological factors.

Does darkness make your hearing more sensitive?

Rebecca Dewey has answered Likely An expert from The University of Nottingham in Neuroimaging, Neuroscience

People who are born without a sense (such as vision) or experience an extended period without it often report or exhibit signs of the other senses (e.g. hearing) gaining sensitivity. This is thought to be due to changes in the brain that facilitate neurons from the sensory cortex of the unused sense being recruited into processing the hypersensitive sense. This change is usually thought to take of the order of days (up to a week) to occur. E.g. a study on rodents showed that hearing (sensitivity to quiet sounds, but also suprathreshold discrimination) was enhanced by a week in darkness. However, this effect was temporary and hearing went back to normal over the course of the days to weeks after the mice were returned to a lit environment.

A separate effect may be that if we go into a dark environment, we are more sensitive to inputs on the senses that we can use, due to less attention being drawn away to what we can see. This attention driven effect is likely even more temporary than the effect described above, and will probably only last a few minutes.