Speaking of augmenting our sensory capabilities, has there ever been any work done on making hearing a voluntary sense? Always-on hearing had some evolutionary advantage in the past but it may be an interesting experiment to put this in one's own control.
According to my wife men have this capability built in...
Kidding aside, really good earplugs, the kind they wear where really loud machinery is in operation, effectively gives you that. Get the foam one that you roll between your fingers to squish them and then they expand to fill your ear canal. They block out a lot of noise.
They block out too much noise in a lot of cases (especially those bullet-shaped orange jobbies with the 33dB attenuation). Without competing environmental noise, your own body noise (and there is a seriously big whack of that) becomes an enormous distraction. I loved them when I worked a hangar line around jet engines, but when trying them to get a bit of quiet in the office, I found that my heartbeat, my joints, the impact of my fingers on the keyboard and the sloshing of blood through the carotid arteries (which are way too close to the ears) constituted a distraction about on par with someone operating a jackhammer outside the window. Now, if there actually had been a jackhammer, the attenuation would have been about right. I found that the much less efficient silicon plugs were better for blocking low-level noise -- they didn't force the AGC circuits to max gain.
Speaking of augmenting our sensory capabilities, has there ever been any work done on making hearing a voluntary sense? Always-on hearing had some evolutionary advantage in the past but it may be an interesting experiment to put this in one's own control.