Humans appear to ‘hear’ with their skin, according to a study published today in Nature. Bryan Gick and Donald Derrick found that the inaudible puffs of air produced by vocalising certain sounds actually modify the way those hearing the sounds perceive them.

“When you make certain speech sounds in English, such as ‘pa’, you release a puff of air. When you say ‘ba’, you don’t,” says Gick, of the University of British Columbia, in an interview running alongside his paper.

“The question was, if a listener were to hear someone saying ‘ba’ but was also touched by a puff of air – so lightly that they were not conscious of it – would their brain trick them into thinking they had heard ‘pa’?”

The answer was yes. Syllables heard simultaneously with a puff of air to the neck or the hand were more likely to be heard as aspirated than those heard without the physical stimulus, they report. So the noise of a b sounded like a p to people being hit by the air puff.

Previous research has shown similar things with visual links to hearing (have a go at the McGurk effect test embedded in this blog post – listen and look, then listen with your eyes closed). The research by Gick and Derrick suggests that these linkages are also present between audio and tactile senses.

This paper is also discussed on this week’s Nature Podcast.