Some people can guess ears using ancient muscles
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A “unnecessary” muscle is something that allows you to wiggle ears when we predict something when you hear something.
Our ancestors lost the ability to turn on ears when millions of years ago deviated from monkeys, but some muscle and brain neurons that emphasize this feature remain in humans.
Many scientists have assumed that the so-called headphones of muscle are obsolete, even to enable ear wiggling. But in 2020, Daniel Strauss At the University of Saarland in Germany and his colleagues found that they were actually activated in front of hearing sounds different directionsYou can ask if people are listening to it even when they are listening.
To explore this, researchers had 20 people with typical hearing, between 22 and 37 years old, to listen to three tests with different difficulties. All participated in 5-minute audiobook clips by counting a female voice pelt Sensors measured electricity activity in their headphone muscles.
In an easy test, a podcast hosted by a male voice that the researchers acted calmly was augimonial. In medium difficulty tasks, they added a quiet female voice clip, similar to the audiole, for configuration. In the hardest test, the background clips were made louder.
The greatest headphone muscle found, the highest muscle, was activated in a difficult test. “It’s pretty amazing to hear that almost forgotten muscle works so hard to hear so hard,” says Strauss.
The team has not evaluated the activation of this muscle given the ability to focus on participants in the main audiobook, but can be objective to measure their activity to assess the effort to listen. This can help develop better hearing aid, aiming to reduce the listening tension, Strauss says.
But first, the results of larger people and hearing abilities that require a range of hearing skills must be verified, says Yusuf Cakmak New Zealand at the University of Otago. The team also did not consider the movements of accounts or facial expressions, which said in the muscle headset activity.
Strauss expects to address some of these points in the future. “More studies are needed in our brain to achieve a deeper understanding of this” neuronal fossil “and how to use it,” he said.
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