Many species, including humans, have vestigial organs that are thought to be useless. But this specific structure might ...

The ears are a pair of sensory organs whose primary functions are hearing and balance. They are divided into three portions: the outer ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear. Each has an intricate ...

Research has shown that actively listening can stimulate muscle movement in the human ear, a phenomenon that, while subtle, can be scientifically measured. Unlike many animals, such as dogs and cats, ...

Ancient ear-wiggling muscles kick on when people strain to hear. That auricular activity, described January 30 in Frontiers in Neuroscience, probably doesn’t do much, if anything. But these ...

“In this experiment, we recorded from two different ear muscles,” says Hackley. “One that raises the ears up, and one that pulls the ear back.” Twenty volunteers got wired up with electrodes around ...

Humans actually have vestigial muscles that activate when listening closely to something, even though people lost the ability to really move their ears about 25 million years ago.

When people are trying hard to listen to something, the body seems to do its best to "prick up its ears," even though this ability was lost by our evolutionary ancestors millions of years ago. That's ...