Paying attention can make you deaf

Have you wondered how you failed to hear the announcement indicating your next stop, and then blamed it on you doing your daily crossword?
Has being engrossed in your favourite novel got your parents all worked up, as you fail to hear them call out your name? If your answer is in the affirmative to both of these situations, you now have a valid study to explain your behaviour.UK Scientists have now demonstrated that when someone focuses their full attention on something, they can become deaf to normally audible sounds. According to them, it happens because visual and hearing senses are trying to share limited brain capacity.
Study leader Professor Nilli Lavie, from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, says, “Inattentional deafness is a common everyday experience. For example, when engrossed in a good book or even a captivating newspaper article, we may fail to hear the train driver’s announcement and miss our stop. Or if we’re texting while walking, we may fail to hear a car approaching and attempt to cross the road without looking.”
In the study, 100 volunteers performed computer tasks involving a series of cross shapes while wearing headphones. Some were easy, such as being able to tell that the arms of the cross were different colours.
Others were more challenging and involved identifying subtle length differences. At certain points, a tone was played unexpectedly through the headphones, after which the experiment was stopped. Participants were then asked if they had heard the sound. When judging colours, only two in ten volunteers missed the tone. But when focusing on the more difficult tasks, eight in ten failed to hear it.