If you can move your ears in small pieces, you can use the muscles of the anoperia. These muscles helped to change the shape of the anoperia or the ears of the ears, and made a sound on the eardrum. Million years ago, our ancestors stopped using them, so the human auricasis is only a trace. However, scientists at Saarland University have now discovered that the anoperous muscle is activated while trying to hear the competition.
The position of the electrode used to cover the excellent anoperous muscle. Image credit: Schroeer et al。 , Doi: 10.3389/fnins.2024.1462507.
“There are three large muscles that connect the auric to the skull to the scalp, which is important for shaking the ears,” said Andreas Schreaer, a researcher at the University of Saland.
“These muscles, especially excellent anoperous muscles, increase their activities during the effort in listening tasks.”
“This suggests that these muscles are potentially involved as part of the attention mechanism, especially in the challenging hearing environment, as well as reflection.
It is difficult to test how difficult someone is without self -reported measures.
However, an electrocardiogram that measures muscle electrical activities helps to identify the activity of the auricasis related to listening well.
Similar studies have already shown that the maximum muscles, the rear and upper nureal muscles react during attentive listening.
Because they are raising their ears and pulling them behind, they are thought to have been involved in moving the nurturna to capture the sound.
“It is difficult to convey the exact reason why our ancestors lost this ability about 25 million years ago,” said Dr. Schleae.
“One of the possible explanations is that the visual system and vocal system are much more skilled, so the evolutionary pressure of moving the ears has stopped.”
In order to test whether these muscles are more active in the more difficult listening tasks, researchers have recruited 20 people without hearing impairment.
They applied electrodes to the participant's auricasis, then played an audio book, and diverted the podcast from the previous or back speakers.
Each participant took 12 5 minutes tests, covering three different levels of difficulty.
In simple modes, podcasts were quieter than audiobooks, and speakers were in contrast to audiobooks.
In order to create two more difficult modes, scientists have added a podcast that sounds like an audiobook and enlarged the distractor.
However, scientists were paying attention to being able to achieve even the most difficult state. If the participants give up, no physiological efforts are registered.
Later, they evaluated the level of effort to the participants and asked to estimate the frequency of losing the audiobook thread in each trial. In addition, we quoted participants about audiobook content.
The authors have discovered that the two auricasis reacts different to different conditions.
The lodgal muscles responded to changes in the direction, but the anoperic muscle responded to the difficulty of the task.
Participants' self -reporting efforts and the frequency of losing the audiobook truck rose in accordance with tasks, and the accuracy of answers to questions about audiobooks remarkably reduced between media and difficult modes. I did.
This correlated with the level of activity of the excellent anoperia. They were more active in medium mode than Easy mode, but were very active in difficult modes.
This suggests that the activity of the muscles can help people hear it, but it suggests that excellent anoperous muscle activity can provide an objective listening effort.
“The movement of the ears that can be generated by the signal we have recorded is very small, so there is probably no knowledge that can be perceived,” said Surea.
“However, the anchle itself contributes to the ability to localize the sound, so our Auriculomotor system probably tried the best attempts after spending traces for 25 million years. I do not.
study Published in the journal Neurology Frontier。
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Andreas Schlowaa et al。 2025. A muscle electrocardiogram correlation of effort in the tracing hearing movement system. front. Neural muscle 18; Doi: 10.3389/fnins.2024.1462507
Source: www.sci.news
