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What happens when you can’t use one of your senses to it’s full capacity? You adapt, or rather, your nervous system often adapts itself to the reduced sensing input.

Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University got a bit of a surprise when they shaved mice whiskers and had them run a maze. In their recent study, the researchers found mice left with a single whisker on one side of their head developed more brain changes, or plasticity, than they had anticipate.(The researchers, not the mice.) .

But they (again, the researchers, not the mice) were even more surprised Surprising finding; mice with full set of whiskers on the other side of the face developed less plasticity.

“These findings show us that a fully functioning set of whiskers on one side of the body dramatically inhibits the ability of a single whisker to remodel the brain,” said Barth. “This finding suggests that we could boost the brain’s plasticity if we ‘turn off’ sensory input from the opposite side of the body.”

Another way of saying this, maybe, is the more plentiful information from the full set of whiskers “interfered” with the mouse’s ability to learn how to use the much more limited flow of information from the one-whisker side. Like you’re trying to listen to your kid telling you about his first ball game on a cell phone in the first row of a Rolling Stones concert. Ain’t gonna work too well.

Feldenkrais Method practitioners often refer to the Weber-Fechner principle when talking about learning or relearning movement patterns. That is, stimulation can be sensed better when the background sensations are less.