Our Hearing Capabilities Eke Us Out

Even the very deaf human individuals are capable of perceiving sounds. Every which way, the ultimate creator did notice the very quivering of this world. He gifted the first creatures with "ears" (either ears or body parts of similar function), to get vibes of such a motion and survive. By the very moment, they first crawled upon the mainland; the first land-dwelling creatures had already evolved their lungs to hear.

Given that every motion of nature has as well rocked us, we're still doomed by sounds.

Sound is critical in natural competition: while the hunted's hearing capabilities is to smell dangers and flee, the hunters' is to creep up on these cautious prey.

Eastern grey squirrels savour sipping chestnuts under the trees with friendly birds chirping around. Instead of bettering the squirrels' feasting experience, the noise from birds signals the absence of fire-tailed hawks - the natural enemies of both. As long as their alliances keep singing, the squirrels should be safe to feast. To an absolute extreme, bats, dolphins, shrews and cave swiftlets are capable of navigating from echoes to either move, forage or "vision" in the dark.

After having feasted and fled, the animals do crave as much sound while mating. Either the nightly chirping, humming, howling or ultrasonic calls from the ocean bed can be a warning of "private hours", mating calls, or "hunting strategy discussions".

In a like manner, years of evolution has taught humans of birds chirping signalling safety. After another mega-annum of civilizing and moving out of forests, modern humans still act upon the sudden deadly silence of the birds as a high sign of disasters sooner or later taking place - a typical plot we've all too often seen in movies.

On the other hand, another study even purported that language - the distinctive feature of humans - is bizarrely similar to birds' chirping. Having separately evolved for the last 300 million years, the brain areas manoeuvring birds' learning-from-sound capability and the human language-related brain regions still are "dead ringers". The "ability" to mimic sounds (by observing parents) limited some species also is latent in birds and humans.

In other words, bird chirps and human voices are, by the very nature, mechanism, or even biological origins, kindred.

We're yet to develop a natural mechanism to pro tempore disable hearing capabilities, similar to how we shut our eyes to halt visual information. We're born immersed in an environment overflooded by noises. Our brains are always listening, thus, catalyzing "signal sound" abilities.

When it comes to human senses, we often single out our vision instead of hearing, given that our blind spots have left us no choice but to turn around for an overview continually; since our ears are hearing every surrounding audio signal. Research has as well evidenced that given our high-frequency sound hearing disability, it has still impacted our human brains.

Light wins the universe speed championship. Among the mediocre humans, however, the auditory system's information processing speed still "crushes" that of the visual system. While processing the very first reaction from photosensitive cells to the retina might take up to milliseconds, the cochlea and the spiral ganglion cells do take a millisecond purely to settle the nerve signals transduction.

As the very pristine information to get processed, sound inputs might, to a certain extent, "distort" our perception towards our surroundings. Ecker and Heller experimented, wherein subjects got exposed to two 3D motion clips on balls on boxes. The two videos, albeit identical, were dubbed with unique sound backgrounds. The former was added with a rolling background sound, while the latter was immersed in a bouncing background.