Stress doesn’t just affect emotions — it changes how we perceive the world.
A study found that mice exposed to a week of stress became less sensitive to loud noises. Their brains showed altered activity in the auditory cortex, impacting how they processed sound. This suggests stress may not only influence memory and cognition but could also subtly shift our everyday sensory experiences, making us more reactive to noise and other stimuli.
Stress Alters Sound Perception in Mice
After a week of repeated stress, mice experienced changes in how their brains processed sound, making them less sensitive to loud noises. This finding comes from a study published on February 11th in PLOS Biology, led by Ghattas Bisharat of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and his colleagues.
Chronic stress doesn’t just affect mental health—it can also alter how we perceive the world. It might make us more startled by loud noises or more sensitive to uncomfortable textures and strong odors. To explore how stress impacts sensory processing, researchers subjected mice to daily 30-minute confinement in a small space for a week. Afterward, they examined how the mice’s brains responded to sound.
Brain Changes in Stressed Mice
After a week of stress, the animals’ ability to hear—measured in the auditory brainstem—remained normal. However, in the auditory cortex, stressed animals had higher spontaneous neuronal activity. In response to sounds, somatostatin-expressing inhibitory cells showed a higher response, while parvalbumin-expressing neurons and putative pyramidal neurons were less sensitive.
In a behavioral task that required the stressed mice to categorize sounds as loud or soft, they were more likely to report louder sounds as soft, which indicates a reduced perception of loudness. While the current study is in mice, the results show that repeated stress could change how animals perceive and respond to the world around them.
Stress May Reshape Everyday Perception
The authors add, “Our research suggests that repeated stress doesn’t just impact complex tasks like learning and memory—it may also alter how we respond to everyday neutral stimuli.”
Reference: “Repeated stress gradually impairs auditory processing and perception” by Ghattas Bisharat, Ekaterina Kaganovski, Hila Sapir, Anita Temnogorod, Tal Levy and Jennifer Resnik, 11 February 2025, PLOS Biology.
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003012
This work was supported by the ISRAEL SCIENCE FOUNDATION, grant No. 725/21 to JR). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
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