Most of us have done it instinctively: squeeze our eyes shut to catch a sound we can barely hear. But new research indicates this habit may actually work against us in noisy settings.

Using EEG to track brain activity, scientists found that closing your eyes pushes the brain into a state called “neural criticality,” where it becomes overzealous in filtering incoming signals — and ends up blocking out the very sound you were straining to catch.

What the research found:

• The noise paradox. Shutting your eyes might genuinely help in total silence, but in environments with background noise — a bustling café, a busy street — it undermines your ability to pick out a specific sound.
• Neural criticality. Eye closure draws the brain inward, prompting it to aggressively screen all external input. The result: both the unwanted noise and the target sound get filtered out together.
• The visual anchor effect. Watching a dynamic video that corresponds to what you’re hearing meaningfully sharpens auditory sensitivity. Visual engagement appears to tether the auditory system to the outside world.
• Synchrony matters. Simply having your eyes open isn’t enough — the real benefit comes from seeing and hearing in sync (for instance, watching someone’s lips move while hearing their voice), which points to multisensory integration rather than attention alone.
• How the study worked. Participants were tested across four conditions: eyes shut, eyes open facing a blank screen, viewing a static image, and watching a contextually matched video.

To the study