Eli5: Why are peoples’ own noises and smells usually dialed down, such as not being affected by their own snoring and not noticing their body odor?

Question

Why does the brain seems to dial down things that we produce; even the obnoxious snoring or noises made while sleeping don’t affect us? Similarly, people don’t usually get annoyed by their own talking or yelling to themselves.

In: Other

Answer 1

for the same reason you don’t notice your nose in front of your face or if you stare into a mirror for a long time your brain gets bored and starts doing wonky things. our brain likes novelty and we’ve spent millions of years evolving so our brain is efficient at noticing things that are different. with things that are constant they are not as important to our survival so our brain chooses to ignore these things, even tho it is still receiving input from them, to save energy. if we spent all our energy realizing that our heart is beating at every second of the day we’d have less energy to fight off that mountain lion that wants to eat your face.