IN MARVEL’S DAREDEVIL, LAWYER-
by-day Matt Murdock fights crime by night
with the help of enhanced senses he developed
after an accident blinded him as a child. Aside
from fanciful comic-book pages, however, be-
ing deprived of sight—whether permanently or
temporarily with a blindfold—wouldn’t super-
charge your hearing. “People imagine blind
people have a sixth sense or something like
that,” says Patrice Voss, a research associate
at McGill University. But it’s not true that they
can discern sounds or frequencies others can’t.
Nonsighted people do, however, have
a certain kind of heightened auditory per-
ception, but that’s because they’re betterlisteners, Voss explains. The absence of sight
can’t bolster the mechanics of physiological
hearing, but the act of listening is a buildable
skill. While sighted folks piece together their
surroundings with an amalgam of visual
and sonic inputs, blind people rely heavily
on noise to get their bearings. They’re espe-
cially adept at noting spectral cues, which
are slight shifts in frequency that happen as
sound waves bounce off the ear’s various
stretches and folds before entering the ear
canal. Pick ing up on those subtle tweaks be-
stows a heightened ability in triangulating the
source of a noise, giving them a daredevilish
edge compared with the rest of us.by Marion RenaultHEAD TRIP
SUPER, SONICcan a
blindfold
boost my
hearing?
ANSWER KEY:
From page 112[WAVEFORMS]
1B, 2E, 3C, 4A, 5D[ONOMATOPOEIA]
1B, 2D, 3E, 4A, 5C[SCI-FI SFX]
1D, 2C, 3A, 4E, 5B
GLENN^ORZEPOWSKI