Wenger and teammates have confirmed an interesting relationship between our senses of touch and hearing. They report that “People can use their sense of hearing for discerning thermal properties, though they are for the most part unaware that they can do so. While people unequivocally claim that they cannot perceive the temperature of pouring water through the auditory properties of hearing it being poured, our research further strengthens the understanding that they can. This multimodal ability is implicitly acquired in humans, likely through perceptual learning over the lifetime of exposure to the differences in the physical attributes of pouring water.”
Mohr Wenger, Amber Maimon, Or Yizhar, Adi Snir, Yonatan Sasson, and Amir Amedi. 2024. Hearing Temperatures: Employing Machine Learning for Elucidating the Cross-Modal Perception of Thermal Properties Through Audition.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 15, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1353490