Driving Affects Listening

Studies have shown that talking on a cell phone can impair our ability to drive. A new study shows that driving makes it hard to hear.

96 participants were paired in a simulator - 1 driving, 1 talking as a passenger or on the phone. Drivers and talkers were told a number of stories. Sure enough, drivers had 20% less ability to recall the details as compared with the passengers. And their conversational skills were the worst when navigate intersections or handling traffic.

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.

Weaklings Have Better Hearing

A study finds that weaker people, like women, tend to have better hearing than stronger male counterparts. The weaker participants perceived threatening sounds quicker than others because they thought the threatening sound was closer than it actually was. Such behavior could be a survival mechanism.

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.

Brain Is An Active Listener

Language is delivered at up to 5 syllables/second so scientists thought listeners kept pace by anticipating a subset of words the listener knew (like how Google Instant works). Functional MRI's show the brain considers different words and narrows choices by considering words beginning with the same sound.

For example, if one says, “I tasted the sweetest can…" your brain might be priming itself to hear "candy" or "cantaloupe", but not "candle."