{"id":236660,"date":"2025-02-11T18:15:35","date_gmt":"2025-02-11T18:15:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/11\/wiggling-ears-may-have-once-helped-us-hear\/"},"modified":"2025-02-11T18:15:35","modified_gmt":"2025-02-11T18:15:35","slug":"wiggling-ears-may-have-once-helped-us-hear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/11\/wiggling-ears-may-have-once-helped-us-hear\/","title":{"rendered":"Wiggling ears may have once helped us hear"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/www.sciencenews.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/MAR_014_25_A_598X336_option2_V02.png?ssl=1\" class=\"attachment-post-thumbnail size-post-thumbnail wp-post-image\" alt=\"Wiggling ears may have once helped us hear\" title=\"Wiggling ears may have once helped us hear\" \/><\/div> \r\n<br><div data-component=\"video-embed\">\n\t\t\t\t\n\n\n\n\n<p>Ancient ear-wiggling muscles kick on when people strain to hear. That auricular activity, described January 30 in <em>Frontiers in Neuroscience<\/em>, probably doesn\u2019t do much, if anything. But <a href=\"https:\/\/www.frontiersin.org\/journals\/neuroscience\/articles\/10.3389\/fnins.2024.1462507\/full\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">these small muscles are at least present<\/a>, and more active than anyone knew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You\u2019ve probably seen a cat or dog swing their ears toward a sound, like satellite dishes orienting to a signal. We can\u2019t move our relatively rigid human ears this dramatically. And yet, humans still possess ear-moving muscles, as those of us who can wiggle our ears on demand know.<\/p>\n\n\n<aside class=\"sn-conversion rich-text rich-text--with-sidebar\">\n<style><![CDATA[\n.email-conversion {\n  border: 1px solid #ffcccb;\n  color: white;\n  margin-top: 50px;\n  background-image: url(\"\/wp-content\/themes\/sciencenews\/client\/src\/images\/cta-module@2x.jpg\");\n  padding: 20px;\n  clear: both;\n}\n\n]]><\/style>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"rich-text embedded-conversion-content is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\">\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/deep-end-podcast-trailer?cta=top\">\n  <\/a><\/div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/deep-end-podcast-trailer?cta=top\">\n<\/a>\n\n<style><![CDATA[\n#dynamic-conversion {\n  border: 1px solid #ffcccb;\n  max-width: 100%;\n  height: auto;\n  clear: both;\n}\n]]><\/style>\n\n\n\n\n<\/aside>\n\n\n<p>Neuroscientist Andreas Schr\u00f6er and colleagues asked 20 people with normal hearing to listen to a recorded voice while distracting podcasts played in the background. All the while, electrodes around the ears recorded muscle activity. An ear muscle called the superior auricular muscle, which sits just above the ear and lifts it up, fired up when the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/blog\/scicurious\/how-brains-filter-signal-noise\">listening conditions were difficult<\/a>, the researchers found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Millions of years ago, these muscles may have helped human ancestors collect sounds. Today, it\u2019s doubtful that this tiny wisp of muscle activity helps a person hear better, though scientists haven\u2019t tested that. \u201cIt does its best, but it probably doesn\u2019t work,\u201d says Schr\u00f6er, of Saarland University in Saarbr\u00fccken, Germany.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>These vestigial muscles may not help us hear, but their activity could provide a measurement of a person\u2019s hearing efforts. That information may be useful to hearing aid technology, telling the device to change its behavior when a person is struggling, for instance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Schr\u00f6er says the wide variety of ears \u2014 and wiggling abilities \u2014 is a challenge for research on ear muscles. \u201cThere\u2019s actually quite a bit of variability in the size of your auricular muscles, which is sometimes also a bit difficult for us when we want to record [their activity].\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>An ear wiggler himself, Schr\u00f6er has collected stories of remarkable ear abilities, such as people who feel their ears moving toward a sound and people who use their ear movements in daily life. \u201cThey just wiggle their ears a little bit, and then their glasses are back on their nose where they belong,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This ear wiggling research is comforting to some people with exceptional ear control, Schr\u00f6er says. \u201cThey really appreciate it because they always thought they were kind of strange.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n<br>\r\n<br><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/wiggling-ears-hearing\">Source link <\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ancient ear-wiggling muscles kick on when people strain to hear. That auricular activity, described January 30 in Frontiers in Neuroscience, probably doesn\u2019t do much, if anything. But these small muscles are at least present, and more active than anyone knew. You\u2019ve probably seen a cat or dog swing their ears toward a sound, like satellite [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":236661,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/MAR_014_25_A_598X336_option2_V02.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[606],"tags":[10524,1626,3227,184601],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236660"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236660"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":236662,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236660\/revisions\/236662"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/236661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}