I had a really weird experience with my AirPods Pro.
I was cooking with the noise cancelling turned on and I sliced off half my fingernail with a potato peeler, right down between the nail and the finger. It was pretty gross.
But I had the noise cancelling on and as I looked at my finger I had this weird out of body experience where I couldn’t feel anything and just felt completely separate from it - I had to take the AirPods out before I could come to grips with the situation and do anything about it.
That noise cancellation is powerful stuff. I can see how it could transport you maybe even as much as VR
There are a whole bunch of reasons (physiological and psychological) why getting a cut like that produces a delayed sensation of pain. Psychologically, if you're deeply concentrated in something (e.g. immersed in listening to music), you might be subject to a form of delayed perception. Physiologically, the cut area may not send pain signals until an inflammatory response mounts against the bleeding. These could combine to produce a significant delay in your (conscious) perception of the wound, even without something like the AirPods.
(One could argue the degree to which it isolates you from the environment acoustically might also be insulating you from heeding your environment at all - sounds like something that might be worth studying!)
I was cooking with the noise cancelling turned on and I sliced off half my fingernail with a potato peeler, right down between the nail and the finger. It was pretty gross.
But I had the noise cancelling on and as I looked at my finger I had this weird out of body experience where I couldn’t feel anything and just felt completely separate from it - I had to take the AirPods out before I could come to grips with the situation and do anything about it.
That noise cancellation is powerful stuff. I can see how it could transport you maybe even as much as VR