Don't Ask the Left Ear

In an Italian dance club a woman approached people and asked for a cigarette. When speaking into people's right ear she got 34 people to give her a smoke vs. only 17 if she spoke into the left ear. It shows that the brain processes sound differently based on which ear its coming from but scientists still can't understand why generosity increases if the request comes through the right ear.

Previous studies have shown that humans tend to prefer listening with their right ears - possibly because right ear auditory stream gets precedence in the brain's left hemisphere, where most linguistic processing occurs.

Hair Allows Hearing

Scientists discovered that our hearing is because our ears have tiny tubelike motors that mechanically amplify sounds.

Hair cells in your ears have spiky hairs like molecular mohawks. When sound waves enter the ear these hairs vibrate, and your brain computes it as sound. But these hairs don't move like grass in the breeze. The electrical signals the hairs produce feed back on the system, causing the hairs to tilt even more - called the “flexoelectric effect."

Hair length in different species explains why animals like bats can detect such high frequency sounds.