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'I can't hear you, I'm too stressed': Repeated stress in mice reduces sound perception

Stressed mice process noise differently in the brain, altering how they perceive the world

Date:
February 11, 2025
Source:
PLOS
Summary:
After a week of stress, mice show changes in how their brains process sound, reducing how well they perceive loud noises, according to a new study.
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After a week of stress, mice show changes in how their brains process sound, reducing how well they perceive loud noises, according to a study published February 11 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology led by Ghattas Bisharat, from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, and colleagues.

Repeated stress has negative impacts on mental health that can go beyond psychiatric disorders. They can also cause changes in how we perceive the world, making us jump at loud noises, or become easily irritated by scratchy sweaters or offensive odors. To understand how repeated stress can impact how the brain processes sensory information, the authors of this study exposed mice to the stress of being trapped for half an hour in a small space daily over the course of a week. They then measured how their brains processed sound.

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.

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."


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Journal Reference:

  1. Ghattas Bisharat, Ekaterina Kaganovski, Hila Sapir, Anita Temnogorod, Tal Levy, Jennifer Resnik. Repeated stress gradually impairs auditory processing and perception. PLOS Biology, 2025; 23 (2): e3003012 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003012

Cite This Page:

PLOS. "'I can't hear you, I'm too stressed': Repeated stress in mice reduces sound perception." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 11 February 2025. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/02/250211141029.htm>.
PLOS. (2025, February 11). 'I can't hear you, I'm too stressed': Repeated stress in mice reduces sound perception. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 30, 2025 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/02/250211141029.htm
PLOS. "'I can't hear you, I'm too stressed': Repeated stress in mice reduces sound perception." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/02/250211141029.htm (accessed March 30, 2025).

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