Taking the opportunity to share a super fun fact about this. The ridges in a human's outer ear allow us to determine whether a sound is coming from above or below by subconsciously noting how different frequencies are bouncing off those ridges. Animals without those ridges can only determine the lateral direction a sound is coming from relative to their head's orientation, and their method of figuring out whether the sound is from above or below is to tilt their heads and "listen on a different plane"
Thanks for letting me be one of today's lucky 10,000.
I love now also having this knowledge, thank you
Veritasium has a video about audio illusions that talks about this! An interesting bit he brings up is how researchers put prosthetics over peoples' ears to change the shape and it caused them to temporarily lose their echo location ability. It went back to normal over the course of several days as the brain adjusted to how the new shape of the ear bounced sound.
That’s super interesting, thanks for sharing!
No, but that which can't be understood might still be killed. Ranging the target absolutely helps with that.
Yes it does
I wonder if humans raising an eyebrow is a vestige of this behavior
What do you mean, humans still do the confused head tilt too.
Let's not get supercilious here.
Or a defense mechanism. Don't eat me, yet. I think there is something here that may kill us both.
