Unlike dogs, cats, rabbits, bats, donkeys, zebras, gerbils and very many other mammals, most humans have great difficulty in independently orienting their outer ears ( pinnae ) towards sounds of interest. But what if we could? This study demonstrates that by opening and closing the human pinna, we can change the direction of […]
Tag: ears
Ear candling action overdue in New Zealand?
Some of those who suffer the inconveniences of excessive ear-wax turn to a radical remedy – a fire-based process called ‘ear-candling’ [see diag.] “Ear candles have been used for centuries and is [sic] considered a painless, inexpensive and non-invasive way to potentially remove ear wax that is easy to use in the privacy of your […]
Earprints as criminal evidence
“An earprint is an impression of the external ear. House breakers may leave their earprints inadvertently when they listen at doors and windows to check if there is anyone inside before breaking and entering a premises. Owing to uniqueness and individualistic characteristics of the human ear, earprints can be used as evidence to link a […]
Ear-orientation in humans – a review
Would you like to be able to move your ears at will? There’s a good chance you already can (using a 25 million-year-old neural circuit). Dr Samuel Alexander Kinnier Wilson [pictured] was the first to formally document the so-called oculoauricular phenomenon in his 1908 paper ‘A note on an associated movement of the eyes and […]
The Kajimoto laboratory (part 3): Pull the ears to navigate
If you’ve ever had difficulty navigating your way around a complex department store, or experienced difficulty with a tricky transfer at a subway station, you may be interested in one of the many cross-modal human/computer research projects [see previous article in this series] which have been developed by the Kajimoto laboratory (a department of The […]
Van Gogh, Lady Gaga and the implications of eccentricity (study)
Attn. artists! Can you get a higher appraisal for yourself and your art by behaving more eccentrically? Say, by hacking off your own earlobe or “cavorting around in little more than a thong”? Such questions have been examined in a new study from Dr. Eric R. Igou (University of Limerick, Ireland) and Dr. Wijnand A […]
Extraocular Phototransduction: more than meets the eye? (part 2)
We recently drew attention to the 1998 discovery at Cornell regarding the possibility of tweaking one’s cicadian rhythms by shining a bright light at the back of one’s knees. But continuing research into extraocular (outside the eye) light stimuli has turned to the possibility of a more direct route. Why not shine a light directly […]
Old folks have big ears
Old men have big ears, is the consensus of several medical studies. The most celebrated work focused exclusively on men, according with British male doctordom’s smug tradition of showing interest mainly in themselves. But in Japan and in Germany, wide-ranging investigations have made plain a long-untold half of the story: that old women also have […]
Unconstrained ear recognition progress
“Ears are a particularly appealing approach to noncontact biometrics because they are relatively constant over a person’s life and are unaffected by expressions, unlike faces.” – explain researchers from the Image Processing and Computer Vision dept. at the University of Southampton, UK in a recent article for IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (A). […]