Are there any disadvantages to using earmuffs?

Question

When using earmuffs in close proximity to big machines are there any disadvantages to this? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

When operating machines that make loud noises, it is sometimes necessary to protect your hearing. But when you take away the signal that comes from one of your senses, in this case your ears (not just because you are using hearing protection the loud noises from the machine overwhelm other noises), the computations the brain makes to give you representation of the environment you are in, is affected. When you are operating potentially dangerous machines, you may think you can rely on your vision, but you may underestimate that this is now affected by not getting any audio signals.

If you see something under normal circumstances, you have to consider why you were looking in that direction in the first place. In many cases there could have been some noise that on a subconscious level made you look in that direction, while at the conscious level you don't have the information about that sound, it may look like a random action. So, without the audio signals, you wouldn't have looked in the right direction, potentially making you not noticing a problem that needed to be addressed.

This does not mean that you should ignore any guidelines to use hearing protection. Rather, it means that you should stick to all the other safety instructions, like e.g. rigorously sticking to check lists when you may feel that's over the top, as well.

That vision and hearing are hard wired together can be seen very clearly from e.g. the McGurk effect. This demonstrates that what you hear is affected by what you see.