[HN Gopher] Ear muscle we thought humans didn't use activates wh...
___________________________________________________________________
Ear muscle we thought humans didn't use activates when people
listen hard
Author : geox
Score : 226 points
Date : 2025-01-31 12:11 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.frontiersin.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.frontiersin.org)
| feverzsj wrote:
| So, movies are actually right.
| mathieuh wrote:
| Whenever I hear a noise behind me this muscle reflexively flexes
| quite hard, especially if it's a sudden noise that makes me jump.
| lttlrck wrote:
| Yes. It's quite a distinct part of my being startled by an
| unexpected sound, similar to hairs raising on the back on my
| neck.
| kennyadam wrote:
| Same. Is this something not everyone experiences or just never
| really comes up in conversation much I wonder?
| dillz wrote:
| Had to scroll surprisingly far to find this comment thread.
| My ears sometimes react the same way on unexpected noises in
| a silent environment. However, I can not move my ears
| voluntarily, none at all.
| datavirtue wrote:
| All I can picture right now is a Ferengi.
| mmastrac wrote:
| I trained myself to wiggle one ear as a kid and it's exactly like
| this. The muscle is much stronger in that ear and there's a weird
| reflex that when something startles me from behind, the same
| muscle that makes the ear wiggle triggers. It happens in the
| untrained ear as well.
|
| Weird phenomenon.
| Gys wrote:
| You trained it? I can wiggle each ear very visibly (and both).
| I hardly ever do but as I remember most people can't. So i
| always assumed it was a DNA thing.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| Not the person you're replying to, but is also trained myself
| to do it. I basically touched the area where the muscle is,
| tried to activate it ... time passes ... and some unconscious
| process figured it out. Now, as a responsible parent, I use
| my super power to troll my kids.
| justanotherjoe wrote:
| It could be both
| ABS wrote:
| I too trained it when I was in primary school after seeing a
| class mate do it.
|
| And like OP I eventually managed to control one ear (right)
| but not the other, even to this day 40 years later
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Same here, same ear
| RajT88 wrote:
| I can twitch my left ear independently from my right. But
| not the right one independently. I'm sure it means
| something. Both at the same time is easy.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I can wiggle each ear very visibly (and both). I hardly
| ever do but as I remember most people can't. So i always
| assumed it was a DNA thing.
|
| After reading the article I think its a "use it or lose it"
| thing where the muscles and ability to control them atrophy
| in our modern environment. We have more competing sounds and
| external means to "turn up the volume" so we can hear a
| particular thing.
| gpderetta wrote:
| I can wiggle either ear independently. It greatly annoys my
| wife and my kids :D
| iszomer wrote:
| Me too but it annoys no one I know. Best use case is when I
| need more bass in my IEM's.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I've always been able to wiggle my ears, but just today I
| learned if I focus I can do one at a time. I'm 33. Thanks for
| the useless new skill!
| techjamie wrote:
| I can also wiggle both ears and tend to do the same thing.
| Always just thought I was weird.
| awinter-py wrote:
| useful for listening to someone through earbuds as well --
| moving back the ear creates an air gap
| RajT88 wrote:
| I wouldn't say I trained it, but I learned to control it.
|
| I do find myself pricking up my ears to hear better, not always
| consciously.
|
| FWIW, I can raise my eyebrows individually, flare my nostrils,
| twitch my nose, and also flex some muscle which pops my ears.
| Useless human tricks. Except popping my ears; super useful on
| airplanes.
| kstrauser wrote:
| If you can't will your ears to pop, here's the manual way:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valsalva_maneuver
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| The method involves closing the mouth and pinching the nose
| shut and trying to "exhale". As the wiki notes further
| down, this can cause damage to your hearing if you do it
| too forcefully, so use other methods first.
| kstrauser wrote:
| True, but it's really, really easy to not do it so hard
| that you blow your eardrums out. Scuba divers do this all
| the time.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| It doesn't work for me, and there is a definitely a voice
| in my head saying blow harder.
| shkkmo wrote:
| That's a way, and perhaps the most common, but far from the
| best. In particular, it has to be used preemptively before
| pressure builds up.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ear_clearing
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| I have a lot of trouble on airplanes. How did you learn to do
| that?
| RajT88 wrote:
| I don't know? I was really young, and as far as I can
| recall I just did it one day.
|
| I always thought it was a muscle in my ears, but I remember
| looking it up, and it's actually farther back like behind
| your throat or something. I can't do just one ear at a
| time, it's all or nothing.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Someone linked this wiki page [1] in the thread. This
| might be it.
|
| > The effectiveness of the "yawning" method can be
| improved with practice; some people can achieve release
| or opening by moving their jaw forward or forward and
| down, rather than straight down as in a classical
| yawn,[6] and some can do so without moving their jaw at
| all by activating the tensor tympani muscle, which is
| heard by the individual as a deep, rumbling sound.
|
| > During swallowing or yawning, several muscles in the
| pharynx (throat) elevate the soft palate and open the
| throat. One of these muscles, the tensor veli palatini,
| also acts to open the Eustachian tube. This is why
| swallowing or yawning is successful in equalizing middle
| ear pressure.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valsalva_maneuver
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > and also flex some muscle which pops my ears. Useless human
| tricks.
|
| Also useful when you're diving. I can equalise without
| holding my nose for the first 10-15m, just by doing the thing
| with the ears. Doesn't work all the way down tho...
| saltcured wrote:
| On the other end, I have the ability to voluntarily move my
| big toe away from the other toes in the horizontal plane of
| the foot. Like splaying toes, but just swinging the big toe
| sideways while the others are at rest.
|
| But, I can only do this on my right foot. It's like I have
| awareness of a muscle and tendon there that is just absent on
| the other foot. It was weird to realize this asymmetry at
| first when I was young.
| jannyfer wrote:
| I can't control wiggling my ears, but I also have felt my ears
| perk up when listening to strange sounds. Sometimes accompanied
| by goosebumps and ASMR.
| tim333 wrote:
| >weird reflex that when something startles me from behind
|
| If you have cats and make a noise behind the ears automatically
| swivel back. I guess we must have something live that in our
| evolutionary past.
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| When I was a lad, I spent some time in front of a mirror trying
| to teach myself to move my eyebrows independently, like Spock.
| I eventually succeeded, but in the process I also learned how
| to move my ears. One downside is that these ear muscles began
| to involuntarily try to help. For instance, if I am looking
| down while wearing glasses, my ears contract to grip the
| glasses so they don't fall off, and after a while these seldom
| used muscles ache from the effort.
| euroderf wrote:
| It was only at the age of 50-something that I found out that
| my ability to move my eyebrows independently is not a general
| population thing. Amaze! Also FWIW I can wiggle both my ears,
| and independently too. Is there a way to make money from this
| ?
| Aachen wrote:
| Huh, how is it not a general population thing? To raise an
| eyebrow is a common expression
| lemonberry wrote:
| I think he means alternating raised eyebrow. Raising my
| left eyebrow is easy but my right requires some
| significant contortion of my face to achieve.
| euroderf wrote:
| A quick googling reveals: "About a third of all people
| can raise one eyebrow: left or right. [..] But the
| ability to raise both eyebrows separately is much rarer.
| If you're not among them, that's because you cannot yet
| control and move the corresponding muscles."
| yapyap wrote:
| There probably is a way to make money off this, but while
| doing so I'm thinking you also would be selling some
| dignity along with it.
| euroderf wrote:
| Isn't that true of more work than any of us care to admit
| ?
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| Now more than ever.
| moi2388 wrote:
| I generally just short my dignity.
| Tool_of_Society wrote:
| Yup I have the same issue with the aching muscles.
| Galatians4_16 wrote:
| Keep at it, those ear muscles will be benching solid steel
| glasses in no time!
|
| Remember; Pain is weakness leaving the body.
| lilyball wrote:
| I did the same thing as a teenager, I taught myself to waggle
| each eyebrow independently, but I never learned to move my
| ears. I didn't realize that was even a learnable skill.
| m463 wrote:
| There was a movie where Jack Black does the wave with his
| eyebrows.
|
| seek the wave, grasshopper.
| kstrauser wrote:
| My ears won't move but I can flip my tongue over. I assumed
| everyone could, but nope. Bodies are so wonderfully weird and
| adhoc.
| smusamashah wrote:
| Someone recently told me that its genetic. Not everyone can
| control that muscle. I can, I learned it after seeing someone
| do it by lifting eye brows. I can control it without moving
| eyebrows now.
| hinkley wrote:
| There's a couple actors that do this. Their character gets
| surprise or concerning news and their ears (and sometimes also
| their scalp) moves.
|
| I find it very distracting personally.
| m463 wrote:
| funny, I do that with my nose when I want to smell something.
| So I tend to flare my nostrils when I'm smelling for something.
| helge9210 wrote:
| Science around human body movements is in its infancy. Motion
| capture can't differentiable various muscle group activations,
| resulting in the same motion pattern. Electric activity sensors
| are not sensitive enough to capture individual muscle movements.
| And there are not enough interesting subjects (top athletes,
| performers etc) available to scientists to improve models and
| methods.
| djtango wrote:
| It's funny because these developments come at a time where a
| large proportion of the world no longer really uses their body
| for their living.
|
| I wonder how different our ancestors perceived the world when
| their survival depended on their athleticism and keen senses.
| What knowledge and skills were common that have been lost to us
| now? There have been articles on HN about scientists
| "discovering" humans can exert control over their pupils and
| more and more scientists are "accepting" that echolocation in
| humans is real and learnable.
| xg15 wrote:
| There are some fascinating stories about kids abducted and
| raised by wolves - who, when they were eventually found and
| brought back into human society, showed seemingly
| "superhuman" senses of hearing and smell. The senses became
| more normal the longer they spent time in human society
| however.
|
| Not sure how credible those stories are, but if they are,
| this would indicate that human senses are a lot more flexible
| than we believe they are.
| sriacha wrote:
| One of my favorite examples is the possibility of humans to
| have magnetoreception.
| roenxi wrote:
| I'm finding the headline is remarkably annoying.
|
| Evolutionary pressure is pretty brutal to things that actually
| aren't used - building a muscle takes energy and is one more
| thing for the body to maintain. I don't see how it is fair to say
| "thought humans didn't use". It is always "if it has a use, we
| aren't sure what it is yet". Nature isn't a perfect architect but
| the odds are just much better that the use is still to be
| discovered than that truly useless bits of the body exist.
| lgeorget wrote:
| When I read "humans didn't use", I understand that other
| animals with which we share close common ancestors still use
| it. Evolutionary pressure can make organs go into disuse so it
| makes sense that we end up with unused organs.
| parineum wrote:
| Evolutionary pressure also would select for not wasting
| energy on a useless organ.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| The selective pressure of small unused organs may be very
| low and virtually disappear in the stochasticity of natural
| selection. It may take a long time for such elements to
| disappear completely
| roenxi wrote:
| A 1% reduction in body mass is a huge advantage evolutionary,
| especially since rather than being cut completely that mass
| could be repurposed as more muscle for competing or more fat
| for lean times. For something in very recent evolutionary
| history (talking the last few thousand years), yeah sure the
| pressure might not have optimised a wasted organ out. But for
| any random organ? Nah, they probably have a purpose and we
| don't know what it is yet. Otherwise there is a big advantage
| to removing 'useless' bits. Evolutionary processes do however
| love little random tweaks and whatnot because they serve a
| useful purpose in weird edge cases and it is much more likely
| we're looking at one of them in any particular case.
| jjk166 wrote:
| And the ability to breath fire would also be a huge
| advantage, but evolution does not seek advantages, it
| merely keeps mutations that happen to be beneficial. No one
| has been born with a mutation that has allowed them to
| breath fire (or if they were they obviously didn't have
| much reproductive success) and thus we are still unable to
| breath fire. No one who has been born with a mutation that
| prevents the development of ear muscles has had especially
| great reproductive success either.
| roenxi wrote:
| Well no, being able to breath fire is probably
| evolutionarily stupid. There is no reason to think it
| would be helpful, it'd presumably involve animals
| building up a highly flammable concoction inside their
| bodies and occasionally exploding. For no gain, since
| they could do what everyone else does and gather
| combustible material and set it alight. And flamethrowers
| just aren't very effective weapons on average since
| they'd tend to burn an animal's home down or be very
| energetically demanding for no upside vs something like a
| good pair of jaws or claws.
|
| If evolution can figure out photosynthesis it can figure
| out flammability. Flammability is actually pretty easy.
| Even monkeys can manage it. There probably have been
| animals that breath fire and it just didn't catch on
| because it is wholly impractical.
| dahart wrote:
| > A 1% reduction in body mass is a huge advantage
| evolutionary
|
| That thought fails to explain the wide natural variation in
| body mass of humans, and within each species on this
| planet.
|
| Edit: for most species being smaller is a disadvantage.
| Mates statistically select for larger stronger individuals,
| and larger stronger individuals are statistically better at
| killing and defending.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| A little study of biology will clear that up. Species
| inhabit different niches. They have different survival
| strategies. Each case requires a different optimal point.
| dahart wrote:
| Please elaborate, I think you misunderstood me. Are you
| defending the claim that 1% human body mass reduction is
| an evolutionary advantage? Your quip about biology should
| _maybe_ be directed at @roenxi?
|
| I was talking about variation within each species, not
| across different species. (Edited to clarify) I was
| talking, in context as a reply to the claim that losing a
| given vestigial organ would improve (lessen) mortality.
| Humans, for example, have wide natural variation in body
| mass, therefore the evidence contradicts the claim that
| "1% reduction in body mass is a huge advantage
| evolutionary".
|
| If a reduction in body mass was an evolutionary
| advantage, we'd be evolving to be smaller over time.
| That's not happening. Why?
|
| In fact, there is an evolutionary advantage in humans to
| being taller and having more muscle, since these traits
| are selected for by mates, and are beneficial for
| hunting.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _I don 't see how it is fair to say "thought humans didn't
| use"._
|
| Did you not learn about "vestigal organs" in grade school?
|
| Maybe consensus has changed lately, but that at least used to
| be a thing.
| roenxi wrote:
| What, if you learn about something at school it is
| automatically true? The same criticism applies there too.
| They were calling things like the appendix vestigial when it
| obviously isn't. People made a big deal about how it doesn't
| do anything and then it turns out it does something. Who'd
| have guessed. The so-called vestigial organs probably all
| have uses. I'd have a much easier time believing most of them
| do than none of them. Otherwise evolution would have done a
| much better job of weeding them out.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _What, if you learn about something at school it is
| automatically true?_
|
| It's a decent indication that people thought it was true.
| dahart wrote:
| > The so-called vestigial organs probably all have uses.
|
| You're right that some organs have been labeled vestigial
| and turned out not to be, but there are other organs that
| we know are vestigial because they don't occur in all
| humans (same goes for other species). Evolution doesn't
| weed things out without there being relatively strong
| effects on survival, and some of these things don't affect
| survival so they drift.
|
| This also isn't binary. There are organs that are still
| classified as vestigial, but have minor or secondary uses,
| perhaps enough for evolution to keep them around, or again
| perhaps because having them doesn't result in any
| statistical mortality.
|
| Speculating and/or carrying beliefs that contradict modern
| evolutionary biologists probably isn't going to work out.
| School might not be always right, but it is most of the
| time, and it's right more often than no school, right?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_vestigiality
| roenxi wrote:
| > but there are other organs that we know are vestigial
| because they don't occur in all humans
|
| That argument is completely invalid because it picks up
| the reproductive organs. At birth most humans don't have
| ovaries and those are anything but vestigial. It'd also
| mistake things like melanin production as vestigial
| because some humans have black skin and others white,
| when in reality it is a geographic adaption. Furthermore
| the argument misses situations where something is
| _sometimes_ an advantage but generally a cost, like
| adaptions that are expensive to maintain but really help
| against certain irregular events (like famines, pandemics
| or more weird edge cases) or that are helpful in small
| doses (like autism, a couple of autistic geniuses
| floating around is a great outcome for everyone).
|
| > This also isn't binary. There are organs that are still
| classified as vestigial, but have minor or secondary
| uses, perhaps enough for evolution to keep them around,
| or again perhaps because having them doesn't result in
| any statistical mortality.
|
| Sure. But if vestigial doesn't mean useless then it isn't
| relevant to my complaint against the headline and the
| person bringing it up just made a rookie mistake.
| dahart wrote:
| I wasn't talking about reproductive organs...
| _obviously_. How about reading some of the link I
| provided?
|
| > if vestigial doesn't mean useless then it isn't
| relevant to my complaint against the headline
|
| Having some minor use doesn't imply there's any
| evolutionary pressure. The problem with your comment
| about the headline is that your comment is incorrect;
| evolution does not automatically remove things. I don't
| know why you would go to battle with known science, but
| good luck!
| roenxi wrote:
| So what are you talking about? And do you have an
| argument or any evidence for why it might be so? You're
| claiming there are organs that are vestigial because they
| don't occur in all humans, but then you don't accept that
| organs not occurring in all humans are vestigial. And
| they are clearly important - several organs that don't
| appear in all humans are absolutely critical. And you
| accept that vestigial organs have minor uses, but you
| don't seem to want to accept that "vestigial organs are
| not useless" is probably a correct statement (which lines
| up pretty well with the Wikipedia article, I might
| observe).
|
| Which parts of your comment are the parts that say
| something? What are they saying? It appears to me that
| you are saying there isn't any evolutionary pressure to
| keep things that are minorly positive to keep from an
| evolutionary perspective, which is surely a mis-read by
| me so I'm not sure what you are trying to get at.
| dahart wrote:
| Did you read the section on the ear, or any of the
| entries under musculature? Try
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%27s_tubercle
|
| > you don't accept that organs not occurring in all
| humans are vestigial [...] several organs that don't
| appear in all humans are absolutely critical.
|
| Huh? Are you suggesting that female reproductive organs
| should be considered vestigial because males don't have
| them? That's not what vestigial means. The vestigial
| organs that serve no known purpose and are missing in
| some humans demonstrates the lack of criticality and
| functionality, it demonstrates there's no human
| dependency on them and that they actually don't have any
| purpose. But not the other way around; a critical organ
| like a reproductive organ missing in some humans does not
| imply it's vestigial... _obviously_. Is that confusing or
| hard to grasp?
|
| It feels like you're trying to construct some sort of
| semantic or logical trap to prove a point, but it seems
| like you misunderstood me somewhere. Using reproductive
| organs as your example is a pretty bad idea - in humans,
| males aren't missing female organs, nor vice versa. We
| start with the same organs, and they grow slightly
| differently. They aren't missing.
|
| What I'm saying, plain and simple, is that your claim
| that "Evolutionary pressure is pretty brutal to things
| that actually aren't used" is false. (According to
| evolutionary biology, not according to me.) There is no
| pressure to evolve unless things affect survival
| (mortality or reproduction). Some organs evolved in the
| past and we still have genes for them, but they no longer
| serve their evolved purpose and also don't affect
| mortality or mating in any significant way, and so there
| is no force to get rid of them. We call those organs
| vestigial. Some of them might be evolving away very
| slowly, which not occurring in all humans might suggest,
| and some might not - because whatever use they have is
| not affecting survival rates enough to matter.
| RajT88 wrote:
| They taught us the appendix was one such organ. Now they are
| thinking it actually has a use and is not at all vestigial.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appendix_(anatomy)#Maintaining.
| ..
| Izkata wrote:
| I remember the pineal gland in the brain as well, that was
| part of why it got used as a source for psychic powers in
| older fiction.
| RajT88 wrote:
| This was a memorable film which feature it:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Beyond_(film)
|
| Based on Lovecraft, so it fits with "older fiction"
| dahart wrote:
| There is only evolutionary pressure on things that affect
| mortality. Vestigial organs can and do exist because there is
| no evolutionary pressure on them, because they don't affect
| mortality.
| nusl wrote:
| There's a lot of stuff that does something after we thought it
| didn't. I don't quite trust folk when they say "Oh, that's just
| there in your body but it doesn't do anything."
|
| I get that some stuff genuinely doesn't because evolution
| deprecated it, but others we might not yet understand well enough
| to know this for sure.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I don't quite trust folk when they say "Oh, that's just
| there in your body but it doesn't do anything."
|
| If you expand that to "You don't need that" it covers the
| appendix, spleen, tonsils, wisdom teeth (even incisors can be
| removed to make room) and probably some other things. I'm in
| favor of keeping all your parts unless absolutely necessary, as
| all of these things seem to have at least marginal purpose.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I generally agree, but:
|
| 1. They used to yank everyone's tonsils at any provocation.
| There was a swing back to trying never to take them. I wish
| my pediatrician would've had mine removed after my nth
| tonsillitis so I didn't have to have them out in my 30s. That
| was fun.
|
| 2. Having had an emergency appendectomy, I'm sympathetic to
| the notion of proactively snipping them any time you happen
| to be in there anyway. Getting a hernia fixed? Oh hey, let's
| grab the appy while we're at it!
| simianparrot wrote:
| Except the appendix is an important organ. It has a high
| concentration of immune tissue and supports the immune
| system in the gut, and it's also a "safe house" for
| beneficial bacteria in the case of food poisoning or other
| gut "clearing" events.
|
| It absolutely should not be just nipped out proactively.
| 1propionyl wrote:
| Makes me wonder what we'd uncover with systematic
| longitudinal studies (within the same culture, rather
| than comparing populations with distinct cultures and
| genetic bases) on effects of male genital mutilation.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Those are all true. However, appendicitis is still the
| most common abdominal surgery worldwide[0] and lots of
| people still die of it. It's easy to make the case that
| someone already undergoing abdominal surgery where the
| surgeon has ready access to it could have long-term lower
| health risk by removing it.
|
| If you live in a country with excellent healthcare and
| you're never far from a hospital, the calculus is a bit
| different. You'll probably be fine. If you regularly find
| yourself far away from modern medical clinics, it's
| easier to defend the idea.
|
| I had appendicitis as a kid. If you've never experienced
| it, trust me, you don't want it.
|
| [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9945388/
| wongarsu wrote:
| If you practice good food safety and hygiene (and live
| around people who do the same) then removing the appendix
| during unrelated surgeries or even preemptively before
| long stays at a place without emergency healthcare can be
| beneficial.
|
| It's a bit of a Chesterton's Fence situation: the
| appendix is really useful, but for you and me the benefit
| was much larger 300 years ago than it is today. Today the
| benefit is small enough that you can remove it with only
| minor considerations (like being more cautious about your
| gut microbiome, and having a slightly worse immune
| system)
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| My favorite - this is to some degree my interpretation though!
| - my favorite is the _default mode network_ , a kind of
| constellation of brain activity.
|
| It's called the _default mode network_ because they found it
| through magnetic resonance imaging or something like this, and
| this activity pattern was the first pattern they saw!... A-ha!
| This is the _default mode network_! The default! The default
| mode! Yes!... the activity pattern in the brain of a human who
| has been persuaded to go into a very tight-fitting tube and is
| there all alone and it's not pleasant.
|
| The default mode is activated during introspection and social
| isolation and among the things it does is generate the
| sensation of being something which is distinctly not part of
| the rest of the world.
| ulbu wrote:
| this is so interesting.
|
| it's not the first nor the last time wish that communities
| would not refrain from changing terminology. fitness is as
| important as accuracy and we shouldn't be wary of dropping
| such inaccuracies, especially when they bring such strong
| connotations.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| For one thing the technology in an MRI based on a
| phenomenon known as nuclear magnetic resonance
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_magnetic_resonance
|
| they dropped the "nuclear" bit because it is scary, it
| doesn't involve any ionizing radiation. It is all about
| making the nucleus wobble but not about splitting atoms. I
| have fond memories of doing NMR experiments in senior labs
| as a physics major.
| alyandon wrote:
| I'm not one to typically have strong fear/anxiety responses
| in situations that aren't actually dangerous. However, I felt
| extremely uncomfortable being partially inserted into an MRI
| tube for a lower body scan. I couldn't imagine being shoved
| head first into that thing without being heavily sedated or
| completely knocked out.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I had a head MRI and my main anxiety involved praying to
| any powers that be that my tooth crown was truly non
| magnetic.
| Loughla wrote:
| Sweet Lord, that is a white hot fear. When you remember
| the really old metal filling you have right before the
| machine kicks on.
| kstrauser wrote:
| The thought crossed my mind, to be sure! I talked about
| all that with the techs beforehand. "Are you _sure_ this
| isn 't going to yank my teeth out?" "Pretty sure. Now
| stop moving around."
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| They put metal detectors even in schools these days,
| can't they put one before the MRI lab?
| lawlessone wrote:
| I have permanent braces attached to the back of my teeth.
| I know they're magnetic, i can feel a slight pull if i
| hold a magnet close to them.
|
| I don't know what i'll do if i ever need an MRI,
| otherwise i'd probably just find it cozy..
| kstrauser wrote:
| I have a simple hiatal hernia. One of the treatment
| options is to basically put a weighted band around your
| esophagus above the stomach so that the weight holds
| everything downward so your stomach doesn't get pulled up
| through the hernia. I imagined being in a car accident or
| some other situation where I'm nonresponsive, the doctor
| ordering an MRI, and me re-enacting the scene from Alien.
| Nah, I'll take my chances with the hernia, thanks.
| kedihacker wrote:
| I feel uncomfortable around x-ray rooms. Can humans feel
| radiation or I am making it up?
| MichaelDickens wrote:
| Humans cannot feel x-rays in the dosages you'd experience
| in an x-ray room. A sufficiently powerful x-ray would
| feel hot the same way a bright light does.
| ballenf wrote:
| The mandatory shielding around these rooms is robust. I
| shadowed a technician inspecting a newly fitted x-ray
| room and observed the very sensitive equipment used to
| verify absence of leakage. There was a small puncture in
| the lead shielding that was quickly found and resulted in
| a delay until patched.
|
| I don't know what you mean by "around" but if you mean
| walking down the hallway outside the x-ray room, my guess
| it's the low frequency sound these machines often produce
| that you're reacting to and not x-rays themselves. Not to
| mention the almost sci-fi signage alerting your brain to
| danger.
|
| And inside the shielding envelope, modern x-ray equipment
| is still at very low levels unless you're the patient
| (and even as the patient, imaging requires much lower
| levels than in the past).
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Could be a million things you subconsciously notice.
|
| * the warning signage
|
| * things that are related to the lead shielding (micro
| changes in gravity, smell of lead salts, ...)
|
| * infrasound caused by the machinery
|
| * people waiting for an x-ray around who are less-than-
| happy...
|
| The problem with this kind of thing is that it is often
| highly individual, and barely, if all measurable with our
| current scientific instruments. Some people keep claiming
| that humans are incapable of even hearing infrasound, or
| sense gravity, claiming anyone who _can_ sense them is
| spreading new-age esoteric nonsense or is mentally ill.
| See also: Electrosensitivity.
|
| I'm not saying these things do or do not exist, just that
| it is in the realm of possibility.
| lawlessone wrote:
| Does it make break down oxygen into ozone ? If it does
| maybe some people smell it
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I wouldn't worry much as an X-ray recipient. There was
| talk in the 1950s about the trade off of getting a
| routine chest X-ray, say to check if you have pneumonia
| if you see your doc about a respiratory infection, vs a
| hypothetical risk of cancer.
|
| Today X-ray dosages are way less because they use
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_radiography
|
| so I wouldn't be afraid to get one. The radiology
| technician though needs to take special precautions
| because they are around it all day. Personally I would
| avoid a CAT scan if it were feasible
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CT_scan#Adverse_effects
| 01100011 wrote:
| Nah, energy is way too low. If they emitted enough for
| you to feel it you'd be dead in a week.
|
| I certainly felt my last MRI though. New machine, so
| probably high powered. Abdominal/liver MRI. Every time
| the RF was on I could feel a gentle warmth throughout my
| midsection. Weird but cool.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I don't really mind medical procedures like that. The time
| I got punched at Elephant Butte Lake and got stitches at
| the emergency room I went into a deeply relaxed state that
| scared the nurse because she thought I'd fallen asleep.
| Even the noise of an MRI machine is not that startling if
| you know it is coming.
| rjbwork wrote:
| Indeed. I have a brain tumor (not cancerous and
| controlled by medication) and for a few years after
| diagnosis I had to get MRI's every few months for the
| first year, then one every year for a few years. It was a
| bit nerve wracking the first couple times but now I can
| fall asleep in those machines lol.
| frereubu wrote:
| During my MSc I spent a total of more than 25 hours being
| scanned in an MRI machine for a study investigating the
| neurobiology of reading, and by the end of the study I was
| so relaxed in there that my main problem was not falling
| asleep because I was lying down with repetitive noises
| around me!
| dv_dt wrote:
| So this activity pattern could actually be the
| _claustrophobia mode network_?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Or "questioning the life decisions that led to finding
| myself in this situation" mode network?
| a_c wrote:
| There is no grand design in biology. If something ain't broke,
| evolution ain't going to fix it. Retina in mammals facing
| backwards that gives rise to blind spot is one example. The
| laryngeal nerve that goes all the way down aorta and back up
| the neck is another
| jjk166 wrote:
| Eh evolution will certainly try to fix things that ain't
| broke, indeed it will try to vary just about everything at
| some point or another. Bad cable management remains because
| no one survives the intermediate steps between functional
| configuration A and optimal configuration Z.
| Iolaum wrote:
| Not exactly. Everything in our body needs energy to maintain
| itself. It has to provide some value for the energy it
| consumes, otherwise not having it becomes an evolutionary
| advantage meaning evolution will gravitate towards it.
| duskwuff wrote:
| What a_c is getting at is that evolution can become trapped
| in local optima. The backwards retina in mammals is
| suboptimal, but it's locally optimal - the path from where
| we are to a better design (like the one in squid) is too
| long for evolution to hill-climb up to.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| Informative X thread on how the recurrent laryngeal nerve
| path is dictated by having to develop embryos through
| chemotaxis:
| https://x.com/culpable_mink/status/1850937701518000383
|
| He mentions that even if you're a giraffe, you have nerves
| just as long running to the end of your spine, and from your
| spint to the bottoms of your feet, so the extra length of
| nerve isn't really a problem.
| a_c wrote:
| There is a pathway for every possible configuration. It
| doesn't dictate whether a configuration is optimal. Maybe
| the laryngeal nerve isn't that bad. But that doesn't
| guarantee all anatomy and physiology optimal
| pfdietz wrote:
| Also, if something truly serves no purpose, evolution will
| allow it to go away.
|
| The classic example is the enzyme needed to make vitamin C.
| In our primate ancestors that lived on a diet rich in vitamin
| C, there was no penalty to losing this enzyme. Mutations that
| destroyed its function were not selected against. As a
| result, we now can't make vitamin C; the remnants of the gene
| for the enzyme have been so damaged that there's no path back
| to the working version.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| On the theme: The phrase "junk" DNA always irritated me. I'm
| glad it is being replaced with "non-coding".
|
| Anybody who has looked at a 4kb demo can intuit that "junk"
| code likely has a function, even if it isn't immediately
| obvious machine code for the host CPU. I'm no geneticist, and I
| understand cells aren't CPUs, but I've read enough to know
| there's at least a tenuous analogy to non-coding DNA and the
| kind of "junk" you might find reversing a 4kb demo that
| procedurally generates its output.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yup, DNA turned out to not _merely_ be a sequence of triplets
| telling a dumb matter printer which hard-coded proteins to
| make - at least according to what little I understand of
| evolutionary developmental biology[0], DNA is _much_ more
| like procedural generation in gamedev or demoscene. That is,
| there 's plenty of _recipes_ for various structures and body
| parts, and then there 's lots of DNA that's responsible for
| conditionally enabling or disabling or modulating those
| recipes, depending on more DNA that controls _when_ and
| _where_ and _how much_ to enable them, and then more - a
| complex network of _logic_.
|
| --
|
| [0] - Didn't get much further than this four-minute intro to
| the field, but _it is a good intro_ :
| https://youtu.be/ydqReeTV_vk.
|
| (EDIT: It's actually the second part of a trio, that starts
| with a four-minute bottom-up overview of organic
| chemistry[1], and ends on a three-minute intro to
| nanotechnology[2]. I recommend the series together for how
| well it frames humans in relation to other life and universe
| as a whole.)
|
| [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8FAJXPBdOg
|
| [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObvxPSQNMGc
| throwup238 wrote:
| There's also epigenetics with mechanisms like histone
| modification and DNA methylation that can control
| expression without changing the DNA, but still being
| heritable.
| mapt wrote:
| There are something like (in the reference diagram I'm
| looking at) eight levels of organization in the structure
| 'chromosome': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatin#/me
| dia/File:Chromati...
|
| Only the first one is DNA, and only a small portion of
| 'coding' DNA was initially regarded as important.
|
| My question is how? Structural organization implies
| information. Who thought "Nah, evolution put that in for
| shits and giggles"? Was it just things we couldn't
| observe at all without modern scanning electron
| micrography?
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| so the thing that makes this complicated is that having
| non-coding DNA that does nothing for an individual can
| still be helpful for a population. they essentially serve
| the same purpose as commented out code that is really
| common when devs aren't using version control. the
| comments won't affect the program as it currently exists
| at all, but they make it so small changes to the code can
| more easily change the functionality.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Maybe not as much commented as _unused_. Turns out, there
| 's plenty of that in DNA, and you can force turning it
| on. See e.g. the bit about snakes growing legs in the
| video I linked - they still carry the blueprint for legs
| in their genome, but have it suppressed.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Was it just things we couldn 't observe at all without
| modern scanning electron micrography?_
|
| Perhaps also that we couldn't imagine, much less accept,
| that a dumb semi-random process tweaking bits could, over
| time, organize those bits into higher level _abstract_
| structures. We still mostly talk about evolution mutating
| genes, where perhaps if you zoom out a little, it 's
| actually working at a higher level of abstraction.
|
| Incidentally, this is the same outlook as some people
| have today wrt. LLMs - they can't accept the idea that
| backprop running on a blob of weights representing a
| simple (if large) graph can start encoding increasingly
| high-level, abstract organizational structures.
| wbl wrote:
| Can't observe and woefully hard to understand. Remember
| in the 1950's the only genetic disease they could trace
| to a mutation was sickle cell and that was guesswork.
| They didn't have any of the cute editing techniques or
| amplification and sequencing tools. It's a miracle they
| figured out what they did.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| More to the point, there is still chromosome structure
| when the cell is normal mode, expressing proteins instead
| of replicating itself. It's just it is spread apart,
| probably like a pop-up book where "pages" will snap open
| and become accessible for transcription as part of gene
| regulation and other times will be folded up so genes in
| that section aren't expressed.
|
| Some of the reason it is tough to make GMO products that
| are really effective is that it's not enough to put a
| gene in and have it expressed a little, you want to have
| it expressed a lot. For instance the first version of
| _Golden Rice_ produced Vitamin A but not enough to
| matter, it took several years to make one that expressed
| the genes strongly enough that it made significant
| amounts of Vitamin A.
| 725686 wrote:
| You might enjoy the book Junk DNA by Nessa Carey. Very
| interesting how complex and interrelated our DNA is. Pretty
| much spaghetti code.
| marliechiller wrote:
| Tonsils are a good example of this. New studies are finding
| that they may be part of the immune system. Anecdotally, I had
| mine removed as a child due to frequent tonsilitis. As an
| adult, I suffer from a number of airborne allergies. Most
| likely a coincidence, but it does make me wonder!
| ajb wrote:
| A lot of this comes from the assumption that our organs each
| have a single purpose, so if the obvious purpose is not
| relevant in humans then the organ is useless. But most organs
| serve multiple purposes.
| s_dev wrote:
| The Chesterton's Fence of body parts.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton
| Damogran6 wrote:
| Man, does THAT sum up the current political climate in
| America.
|
| There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let
| us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected
| across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up
| to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it
| away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do
| well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly
| won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when
| you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it,
| I may allow you to destroy it."[97]
| MrPatan wrote:
| The Chesterton fence defense (yeah!) doesn't apply.
|
| Did you care about Chesterton when the previous set of
| fence-smashers went around smashing (much older) fences?
| estebank wrote:
| The Chesterton fence argument is that you need to
| understand why the fence is there. If you _do_ understand
| it, and still remove it, it doesn 't say that's bad.
| card_zero wrote:
| No matter how hard I twiddle the left nipple, I can't seem to
| pick up Jazz FM.
| yread wrote:
| My grandfather managed to persuade me when I was 4 that beer
| comes out of man's nipples. Unfortunately, at the time he was
| supposedly too old for it to happen. And my father was too
| young. So, I've never seen it in action
| andrewl wrote:
| Agreed. There is, or at least were, some parts of the body that
| were only recently _discovered_ and not just known about and
| assumed to be inactive. It was only in 2015 that lymphatic
| vessels were discovered in the central nervous system:
|
| https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lymphat...
|
| That article is about mice, but they were later found in
| humans, too.
| adolph wrote:
| Epistemological modesty/honesty is undervalued compared to
| confident certainty (in my mind at least).
| pc86 wrote:
| I would expect at least _some_ evolutionary pressure to get rid
| of unused things in your body. Let 's just take the appendix as
| an example because it's probably the most common "you don't
| actually need this" thing that people know about.
|
| Some appendixes burst. Sometimes this kills people. Sometimes
| this happens before that person has been able to reproduce.
| Wouldn't this cause selection for people who at the very least
| don't have bursting appendixes (appendices just sounds wrong to
| my inner narrator in this context), but also for people who
| have smaller ones. Over time this pressure would decrease but
| shouldn't it theoretically over many many generations result in
| smaller and smaller, eventually disappearing, appendixes?
| grog454 wrote:
| I would think so. Who says that's not happening now? It seems
| reasonable that evolutionary pressure can be strong enough to
| have a significant impact in 1-2 generations (for example due
| to the introduction of a new environmental threat) or weak
| enough to take thousands of generations.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Appendix is being appreciated these days as a reservoir of
| good gut bacteria. So there's actually probably some pressure
| to keep it around. Appendicitis is a thing but of course not
| everyone suffers it. Maybe in the primitive world you were
| more likely to see your skull meet a rock before that
| happened in significant numbers of people in the population
| to the point it affected offspring counts.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| Can we be sure that we don't need the appendix ?
|
| We used to think tonsils are optional as well, and there seem
| to have been some studies that find a link between
| tonsillectomy & Crohn's, Hodgkin's or even breast cancer
| (from wikipedia).
|
| There surely must be vestigial parts in our organisms, like
| the one in the article, but more often than not we have no
| fucking clue how they interconnect with the whole and what
| their function is.
|
| I think. I'm not a doctor or anything.
| evertedsphere wrote:
| for me, appendix / appendixes (organ) / appendices (to a
| book) too, just like index / indexes (database) / indices
| sixo wrote:
| Whether a thing can be selected-out depends on the shape of
| the fitness landscape in the environment.
|
| For example, appendix-bursts are clearly rare enough and
| treatable-enough that they cannot be selected-out in modern
| humans. (But almost nothing can if almost everyone is able to
| reproduce, and any selection effects will be driven by the
| _number_ of children which is largely cultural.)
|
| If a thing hasn't been selected out, you can roughly conclude
| either that:
|
| 1. The selection pressure to do so isn't strong. Either few
| appendix bursts occur in an ancestral env, or they don't
| disrupt reproduction bc they happen later in life, or are
| treatable, or other causes of death kick in before the
| appendix matters.
|
| 2. Or, if the selection pressure is strong, there is "nowhere
| to go" in gene-space that improves this aspect of fitness,
| within the search-radius. (Which is really equivalent to 1:
| the selection pressure isn't strong _enough_ to search widely
| enough)
|
| 3. Or there is a stronger selection pressure _for_ it, even
| if you can 't figure out what it is, like the "backup gut
| bacteria" thing for the appendix. (Which is actually
| equivalent to 1/2 also: the selection pressure isn't strong
| enough to find a way to separate the upside from the
| downside)
| arijo wrote:
| Take mitochondria as an example.
|
| There has been a revolution in the understanding how this
| organelle works in the last few years.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089865682...
| ndr wrote:
| Evolution works on a different timescale than what science
| divulgation headlines, and selected lineages to care about how
| to cross deadly valleys even though they might have appeared
| rarely. There's little room for baggage.
| desibanda wrote:
| I know how to look hard by squinting my eyes and trying to focus,
| talk hard by speaking as loudly as I can or smell hard by
| breathing in as much as I can, but how do you listen hard?
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Try explaining in words how to raise a single eyebrow to
| someone who can't.
|
| Tactile intelligence and semantic intelligence do not overlap
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| I've gotten at least two people (youths) to be able to raise
| a single eyebrow by placing their finger on their eyebrows
| and feeling their muscles activate as they raise and lower
| both eyebrows. Keeping your fingers on the eyebrow muscles,
| it's almost like your brain can start to "see" the two
| distinct muscles. It didn't take them too long (days not
| weeks, not hours) to be able to raise an eyebrow.
|
| There's probably a biological component to it to, I'm not
| saying this will work for everyone because it didn't work for
| my spouse.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Part of the teaching was physical. Hard to do it with words
| alone
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Quiet batpeople.
| blarg1 wrote:
| My ears tire when hearing foreign languages spoken, it feels like
| my ears keep automatically trying to discern each word as if I
| might understand them.
| kennyadam wrote:
| Stapedius-mediated phonemic saturation is almost unheard of by
| most people.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| There's money here to whoever can capture the activation of these
| muscles to control prosthetic cat ears. At the rate I see them
| the prosthetic cat ear market must be double-digit billions.
|
| Seriously, though, it makes me wonder if the activation of these
| muscles could be used in a hearing aid application. Why not add a
| couple rear-facing highly directional mics and use these muscles
| to control their gain?
| hyperbovine wrote:
| I have this weird muscle in my ears I can flex to block out (or
| at least lessen) loud noises. I've never been able to explain it
| adequately to anyone, or find out what is going on, but it's
| absolutely real and not just, wait for it, .. in my head :-)
| fumar wrote:
| If I do that, I hear a rumbling. I never used it to block out
| sound.
| mimentum wrote:
| Same. Wonder how common this is.
| Tor3 wrote:
| Same here, I hear a rumbling. I do occasionally use this to
| block or lower very loud (potentially hearing-damaging)
| sounds if there are no other means available.
| wkjagt wrote:
| I can do the rumbling too. And a clicking too. I can even
| make someone else hear my ear clicking by having them press
| their ear to mine. I wonder if that's causes by the same
| thing.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > And a clicking too.
|
| You should get a check-up, when I heard clicking I had some
| wax accumulation.
| hinkley wrote:
| According to the Wikipedia article it may be involuntary.
| gorlilla wrote:
| I tried explaining this to my wife and she thought I was crazy.
| Turns out she was right, but not for this reason.
| dguo wrote:
| I can do the same and also didn't know how to explain it until
| I stumbled upon this subreddit:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/earrumblersassemble/
|
| So apparently we can control our tensor tympani muscle:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_tympani_muscle
| krisoft wrote:
| That's absolutely real. It sounds like you are describing the
| Tensor tympani muscle.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_tympani_muscle
|
| In modern cars when the vehicle detects an impending collision
| it floods the cabin with pink noise to trigger a reflexive
| contraction of this muscle to protect the passenger's hearing
| from the even louder sounds of the collision and the airbags.
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/pink-noise-says-prepare-for-impact
| albrewer wrote:
| Sounds like you might have conscious control over your tensor
| tympani muscle[0].
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_tympani_muscle
| teeray wrote:
| There's muscles in my ears that I have conscious control of that
| don't really seem to do anything other than make a rumbling
| sound. They were fun to use when I was young playing, since I
| could make explosion sounds and get a realistic rumbling bass
| too. Are these the same muscles?
| jrmg wrote:
| Seems like not:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_tympani_muscle
|
| I can do this too. The article mentions it being "rare", but it
| sounds like it hasn't really been studied so might actually be
| common. From casual discussion with friends in the past I
| suspect it's more like 30-50% of people.
| xg15 wrote:
| Same here and I always sort of assumed this was a normal
| thing of the human body. I'm kinda shocked to learn that many
| people _can 't_ do it.
|
| What kind of muscle can switch between voluntary or
| involuntary depending on the person?
| fluoridation wrote:
| Oh, so that's what that is? Crazy. Subjectively (besides the
| sound) it just felt like a vague pressure in my head, near
| the neck, so I never could figure out what the hell it was I
| was doing.
| anotherevan wrote:
| As the article mentions, the tensor tympani muscles are also
| involved in hyperacusis, which is an inability to tolerate
| sound at volumes most people have no issue with.
|
| One of my kids has this. The best analogy I've found is it is
| like standing out in the sun when you already have sunburn.
| _fs wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/earrumblersassemble/
| hinkley wrote:
| I do this sometimes when my ears are congested and I'm trying
| not to do weird things with my jaw where people can see, to
| open up my Eustachian tubes. It works about a third of the
| time.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Most people may not use these muscles, but I do, to adjust the
| focus of my bifocals as needed. Zoom and enhance!
| alexjm wrote:
| That was how I learned to tense my ear muscles -- because I
| could see they made my glasses shift on my face.
| otikik wrote:
| I ... thought this was common knowledge.
|
| I learnt how to wiggle my ears when I got startled by a book
| falling from a shelf and my ears instinctively "raised". Picture
| a dog going from "idling" to "alert", with the ears pointing up.
| It was like that, but for humans.
|
| I then said "Ooooh, so that's how you do it".
|
| There has never been a doubt in my mind that the muscle is
| connected to "alert, listen closely".
| tim333 wrote:
| There's a lot of odd stuff we're gradually figuring. Also
| interesting, some of the hair cells in the ear act as amplifiers
| and you can hook them up to an electrical sound signal and have
| them dance around:
|
| https://youtu.be/pij8a8aNpWQ
|
| I suspect the standard explanation for that as given under the
| youtube video:
|
| > Since the amplitude, and hence the mechanical energy, of
| airborne sounds is tiny, the cochlea mechanically amplifies the
| incoming vibrations.
|
| is wrong as it doesn't really make sense from an engineering
| point of view - if you've already detected the sound to activate
| the hair cell then that job's done. My theory is they actively
| damp down the large vibrations so you can pick up the small ones.
| There's a 10^5 amplitude difference between large and small.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _the cochlea mechanically amplifies the incoming vibrations_
|
| Is that even possible in principle? Amplifying requires adding
| energy, it has to be either provided from somewhere else or
| redistributed from other parts of the input.
|
| EDIT:
|
| Aha, but apparently this system is not a _passive_ amplifier at
| all! Per Wikipedia[0], this is an active, _electromechanical_
| amplifier, which makes the explanation you quoted more
| reasonable (if not accurate).
|
| --
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_amplifier but the
| core observation is also stated in summary here[1].
|
| [1] -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_of_Corti#Cochlear_amplif...
| philomath_mn wrote:
| Idk man, survival seems like a pretty blunt selection force
| for such an intricate mechanism
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| The angle you tilt your head to, to REALLY listen intently is
| known as "Mozart's Incline". Honest.
| Tool_of_Society wrote:
| Am I the only one that consciously uses that muscle??
| yrcyrc wrote:
| Nope. Came here to find such relating experiences and only
| found yours.
| bmicraft wrote:
| Very useful with anc in-ear headphones in if I want to listen
| for something quickly.
| kazinator wrote:
| This is not news. People know this. I can move my ears
| voluntarily, and when I'm trying to listen, I can feel that
| happening. It's probably half conscious. There is an intuitive
| purpose behind these muscles, which is to do the best impression
| of pricking up your ears that some evolutionary predecessor was
| able to do better.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| "Huh, we cut through that muscle every day"
|
| -ear nose and throat surgeon
| orangepenguin wrote:
| I think there's a big difference between "activating" a muscle
| and "getting utility" out of it. Sure, maybe it activates
| sometimes, but what does it _do_? Well... nothing. It 's a
| vestigial structure.
| hackernj wrote:
| I can't move my ears at all. My wife can do the following: raise
| either eyebrow; move either ear back and forth; move either ear
| up and down; twitch the upper left lip, or the upper right lip,
| or the lower left lip, ...; and twitch either nostril.
| moi2388 wrote:
| Today I learnt some people can't move their ears, eyebrows or
| nostrils.
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