Some people can wiggle their ears using old muscles
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A “useless” muscle that allows some people to wiggle their ears is activated, activated when we are pouring to hear something.
Our Ape -Forfathers lost the ability to turn their ears as they diverged from monkeys millions of years ago, but some of the muscles and brain neurons that support this property remain in humans today.
Many researchers have assumed that these so -called auricular muscles are outdated, even if they enable earbuds. But by 2020, Daniel Strauss found at Saarland University in Germany and his colleagues, who were actually activated in responsible for hearing sounds from different directions, and promoting them to wonder that this also happens when people concentrate on the list.
To explore this, the researchers had 20 people with typical hearing, all between the ages of 22 and 37, to take three hearing tests of different difficulties. Those involved all with focusing on have 5 minutes of audiobook clips narrated by a female voice, while skin sensors measured electrical activity in their auricular muscles.
In a light test, the researchers quietly played a podcast that hosted a male voice at the same time as the audiobook. In a medium-difficulty task, they added a quiet clip of a female voice similar to that of the audiobook. In the most difficult test, both background clips were made higher.
The researchers found that the large auricular muscle, the superior auricular muscle, was most activated during the difficult test. “It’s pretty amazing to see this almost forgotten muscle work so hard during efful listening,” says Strauss.
The team did not assess whether activating this muscle helped the participants’ ability to focus on the most important audiobook, but measuring its activity could provide an objective way of assessing listening efforts. This can help develop better hearing aids aimed at minimizing the listening tribe, says Strauss.
But first, larger studies involving people of different ages and with a number of flax skills are to verify the results, says Yusuf Cakmak at the University of Otago in New Zealand. The team does not explain eye movements or facial expressions, which can affect the activity of auricular muscles, he says.
Strauss hopes to tackle some of these points in the future. “Several studies are needed to get a demer understanding of this ‘neural fossil’ in our brain and how to do it,” he says.
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