What are you hearing right now? Traffic? People? Birds? Maybe a dog barking? All day long, we tune in to and out of the sounds around us. We focus on what we want to hear, and try to not listen to sound that distracts us.

For our show today, we dug around in the archives for some stories that center around the concept of tuning in and out. We’ll hear about a woman whose sense of hearing suddenly became incredibly acute, so much so that she could hear her own eyeballs move. We’ll find out how tuning into soothing harp music can help patients tune out their pain. And, we’ll explore how surgeons fine-tune their focus in the operating room.