Hearing- The Most Active Sense?

If you’ve lived in the city or are working or travelling around, you will probably notice that there are sounds everywhere.

The buzzing traffic, the bustle as people scramble for work, the construction workers nearby, chairs being dragged across the floor, noisy neighbours, the television playing, the phones ringing, the hushed but still audible conversations around your desk at work…and of course, actual conversations you have.

No wonder we become irritated so quickly when there is an overload of sounds. And the best way to calm a person who’s overwhelmed is to take them to a quiet place.

Our sense of hearing is always on. You hear the sounds of everything within range, whether or not you can make out what it actually means.

You can close your eyes. You can not taste something. You can not feel anything. You can, perhaps, not smell a thing (how do odours and smells work?).

But our ears have no shutting mechanism. It’s the only sense that requires us to artificially create a shutdown protocol. Whether it’s shutting up everyone around you, shutting yourself inside a room or wearing noise cancellation devices.

We try to create an environment such that our ears won’t have to pick up every stray sound.

It’s probably connected to our sense of fear. Many people are afraid of loud noises. People say that the fear of loud noises is the only inherent fear that babies are born with.

Maybe back in the hunter-gatherer days, having an acute sense of hearing helped us survive.

Imagine sleeping around a fire in the middle of the forest, and then waking up because you heard something rustling. Probably a wild animal of some sort. And if you really strained yourself, you could place your ears to the ground and sense an earthquake coming.

Who knows?

And it would seem our sense of hearing is the last thing to shut down when we die. Lending it an eerie quality, even.

Heck, aren’t there movies where coma patients revive because they heard their loved ones' voices? Apparently, it’s true that coma patients’ brains react to sounds.

And why is it that in ghost movies, they always scare you with the background music and strange, unearthly sounds?

There’s something primitive about our sense of hearing.

What do you think?