I'm sensing something odd here

This is pretty strange stuff.

Physorg.com:

Harnessing Our Sensory Superpowers

March 12, 2010

(PhysOrg.com) -- New research in perceptual psychology and brain science is revealing that our senses pick up information about the world that we thought was only available to other species, Lawrence Rosenblum, UCR professor of psychology, writes in a new book.

Blind mountain bikers use echolocation to hear rocks in the trail. A connoisseur sniffs out the world’s most expensive cup of coffee. An artist whose sight disappeared as a young man paints and chooses his colors by touch.

New research in perceptual psychology and brain science is revealing that our senses pick up information about the world that we thought was only available to other species, Lawrence Rosenblum, professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, writes in a new book, “See What I’m Saying: The Extraordinary Powers of Our Five Senses” (Norton, 2010), published this month.

“We have hidden sensory channels we’re using all the time. This enables us to perceive things, often without awareness of where we get the information,” Rosenblum says. His 350-page book is aimed at getting people interested in new research on the senses. He uses numerous examples of people who have strengthened sight, hearing, smell, taste or touch - such as blind baseball players and a sommelier who can taste the vintage of a fine wine - to explain how the brain uses multiple senses and the subtlest information to perceive the world, and suggests ways to further develop those senses.

Brain-imaging and other tools have enabled researchers in the last decade to discover that the human brain is capable of changing its structure and organization - a process called neuroplasticity - as it is influenced by experience.

“It turns out that vacant areas of the brain are co-opted, and this can happen if you’re blindfolded for only 90 minutes,” he says. Removing sight as a sensory power can quickly enhance the senses of hearing, and even smell, for example.

Still, even without sensory loss, we already accomplish many of these exotic sensory skills. “We all have an onboard sonar system and a type of absolute pitch; and we all can perceive speech from seeing and even touching faces,” Rosenblum writes in “See What I’m Saying.” “What’s more, we engage many of these skills all day long. What largely distinguishes the expert perceiver from the rest of us is the same thing that gets us from here to Carnegie Hall: practice.”

Rosenblum has spent two decades studying multisensory perception, lipreading and hearing. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. He is internationally known for his research on risks the inaudibility of hybrid cars pose for blind and other pedestrians.

More information: http://www.psychology.ucr.edu/faculty/rosenblum/index.html

Provided by University of California, Riverside

Here's an older study from the same guy. Fascinating stuff:

Lip-read me now, hear me better later

April 12, 2007

Experience hearing a person's voice allows us to more easily hear what they are saying. Now research by UC Riverside psychology Professor Lawrence D. Rosenblum and graduate students Rachel M. Miller and Kauyumari Sanchez has shown that experience seeing a person's face also makes it easier to hear them.

Rosenblum’s paper, “Lip-Read Me Now, Hear Me Better Later: Crossmodal Transfer of Talker Familiarity Effects,” will appear in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science, published by the Association for Psychological Science.

Sixty college undergraduates were asked to lip-read sentences from a silent videotape of a talker's face. These subjects all had normal hearing and vision and had no formal lip reading experience.

After an hour of lip reading, the students were asked to listen to sentences heard against a background of noise and to identify as many words as they could. Half of the students heard sentences from the same talker they had just lip-read, while the other half heard sentences by a new talker. The undergraduates who lip-read and heard speech from the same talker were better at identifying the noisy sentences than those who lip-read from one talker and heard speech from another.

These findings suggest that when we watch a person speak, we become familiar with characteristics of their speaking style which also are present in the sound of their speech. This allows talker familiarity to be transferred from lip reading to listening, thereby making a talker easier to hear. These results have implications for individuals with hearing impairments as well as for brain lesion patients, Rosenblum said.

Source: Association for Psychological Science