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People who have lived most of their lives blind often have extraordinary hearing abilities. In new research published in the Journal of Neuroscience, my colleagues and I discovered that this ability arises from how their auditory systems are able to more consistently and reliably process sounds compared with people who aren't blind. And interestingly, sighted musicians seem to enhance their hearing through a similar mechanism.

Hearing is a complicated process. It involves many stages, starting from how the ears detect sounds and going all the way up to how the brain extracts meaningful information from those sounds.

Different mechanisms are involved, too. You can get better at hearing by being more selective or more consistent. Think of writing the letter "A." You can practice to make your "A" either more distinguishable from "B" or more similar to other "A's" every time you write it. The latter is called internal noise—how consistently your auditory system responds to the same sound over time. The less internal noise you have, the more reliably you can tell similar sounds apart.

We recruited nine individuals who became blind before the age of 2 and 18 sighted individuals. Participants in both groups had varying levels of musical training, giving us an opportunity to examine how musical experience can also affect hearing abilities.

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