Might this study about whiskers in mice be educational for whiskered humans — about similar human capabilities they may be under-utilizing? The study is:
“Detection and neural encoding of whisker-generated sounds in mice,” Ben Efron, Athanasios Ntelezos, Yonatan Katz, and Ilan Lamp, Current Biology, vol. 35, no. 6, 2025, pp. 1211-1226. The authors report:
Whisking against objects generates sound that evokes auditory responses, enabling mice to identify objects….
More Mice Info, for Those Who Want It
The study provides further detail about the mice and their adventures:
The vibrissa system of mice and other rodents enables active sensing via whisker movements and is traditionally considered a purely tactile system. Here, we ask whether whisking against objects produces audible sounds and whether mice are capable of perceiving these sounds. We found that whisking by head-fixed mice against objects produces audible sounds well within their hearing range. We recorded neural activity in the auditory cortex of mice in which we had abolished vibrissae tactile sensation and found that the firing rate of auditory neurons was strongly modulated by whisking against objects. Furthermore, the object’s identity could be reliably decoded from the population’s neuronal activity and closely matched the decoding patterns derived from sounds that were recorded simultaneously, suggesting that neuronal activity reflects acoustic information. Lastly, trained mice, in which vibrissae tactile sensation was abolished, were able to accurately identify objects solely based on the sounds produced during whisking. Our results suggest that, beyond its traditional role as a tactile sensory system, the vibrissa system of rodents engages both tactile and auditory modalities in a multimodal manner during active exploration.