“I can’t hear you, I’m too stressed.”

After a week of stress, the mice showed a sound change in brain processes, thus reducing their perception of loud noise.^Th In an open magazine PLOS Biology Led by Ghattas Bisharat, a university in Negev, Israel and colleagues.

Repeated stress can negatively affect mental health, which may go beyond mental illness. They can also lead to our perception of the world, causing us to make loud noises, or changes that are easily irritated by a scratched sweater or an offensive odor. To understand how repeated stress affects how the brain processes sensory information, the authors of the study were stranded in a small space for half an hour a day for a week. Then, they measured how the brain processes sounds.

After a week of stress, the animal’s hearing ability (in the auditory brain stem) is normal. However, in the auditory cortex, stressed animals have higher spontaneous neuronal activity. In response to sound, inhibitory cells expressing somatostatin showed higher responses, while albumin-expressing neurons and putative pyramid neurons were less sensitive. In a behavioral task, mice that require stress classify sounds as loud or soft, and they are more likely to call sounds soft, suggesting a reduced perception of loudness. Although the current study is in mice, the results suggest that repeated stress may alter the perception and response to the surrounding world.

“Our research shows that repetitive stress can not only affect complex tasks such as learning and memory, but may also change our response to daily neutral stimuli,” the authors added.

Quote: Bisharat G, Kaganovski E, Sapir H, Temnogorod A, Levy T, Resnik J (2025) Repetitive stress gradually impairs hearing processing and perception. PLOS Biol 23 (2): E3003012.