Deaf people have Superhero senses?

Now, it’s generally believed that people with Hearing Loss or who are fully Deaf have daredevil like other senses, but is this necessarily true? Let’s explore this myth.

Scientifically, Hard of Hearing or Deaf people don’t actually have other superhero-like senses, but rather they have underlying changes in their brain. I actually have my own experience with my other senses being heightened, or at least, the feeling that they are! 

Being a race car driver, it’s already hard to hear anything other than the car you or driving and maybe 2 or 3 cars around you, that’s it. But for me being hard of hearing, I hear EVEN LESS! 

I noticed particularly that I started to focus much more on what I was feeling inside the car such as handling, vibrations, and other things like that, and I also noticed that I started to focus more in a visual aspect, looking more around at other drivers, their cars, their vehicle placement when entering turns, where they were around me, what I thought they were going to do. I noticed that I started to pick up subtle differences in drivers which others couldn’t.

What did this do for me? Well, I started to be a much smarter racer. Picking my lines wisely, timing my overtakes correctly to be able to maximise on that opportunity. It really had a benefit on myself and my race craft! One quote that I love from a previous interview I conducted with Deaf race car driver, Lonnie Tanenberg, is “I can feel more than you can hear”, suggesting that Lonnie focused more on what he felt in the car. I think that quote is t-shirt worthy! 

Now, back to the science. Are Hard of Hearing or Deaf people really superheroes when it comes to other senses? Well, a study from the University of Oregon found that people who are deaf from birth tend to be more sensitive to light or motion in their peripheral vision, compared with people who can hear.

Why is that? Well, your brain’s visual system has two main pathways of communication, the “where” pathway, and the “what” pathway. The “where” pathway provides information about an object’s location and motion, whilst the “what” pathway provides information about object recognition. 

There have been studies which have shown that in deaf people, there has been an increase in activity in the “where” pathway during motion tracking experiments, which explains the myth that deaf people have increased peripheral vision. 

What’s even crazier? Read this section from a piece on livesciene.com – “Karns and her colleagues wanted to know whether the areas of the brain responsible for hearing were also organised differently in deaf people, compared with people who could hear. In previous experiments with people who can hear, when the participants see a light flashed in their peripheral vision and hear two beeps at the same time, they experience the illusion that they saw two flashes of light. Karns’ team ran the same experiment with deaf individuals, except the beeps were replaced with puffs of air on the participants’ faces.

Deaf people reported seeing two flashes of light when they felt two puffs of air, suggesting they use touch the same way hearing people use sound: to improve visual accuracy”. How crazy is that?! 

Now, however crazy this may sound, studies have also found that the fovea, the central part of the eye, is actually no better in deaf people compared to hearing people. This suggests that whilst other senses like your vision isn’t necessarily ‘better’, it’s more that deaf people are able to pick up on an target more objects in their peripheral vision, and in general, focus more on what they are looking at. 

So whilst you could say that deaf people can see more than hearing people, unfortunately, it’s not likely they have any superhero senses! Still though, it’s some pretty interesting research, and I am going to use it my advantage when racing!