I trained myself to wiggle one ear as a kid and it's exactly like this. The muscle is much stronger in that ear and there's a weird reflex that when something startles me from behind, the same muscle that makes the ear wiggle triggers. It happens in the untrained ear as well.
When I was a lad, I spent some time in front of a mirror trying to teach myself to move my eyebrows independently, like Spock. I eventually succeeded, but in the process I also learned how to move my ears. One downside is that these ear muscles began to involuntarily try to help. For instance, if I am looking down while wearing glasses, my ears contract to grip the glasses so they don't fall off, and after a while these seldom used muscles ache from the effort.
It was only at the age of 50-something that I found out that my ability to move my eyebrows independently is not a general population thing. Amaze! Also FWIW I can wiggle both my ears, and independently too. Is there a way to make money from this ?
I did the same thing as a teenager, I taught myself to waggle each eyebrow independently, but I never learned to move my ears. I didn't realize that was even a learnable skill.
I wouldn't say I trained it, but I learned to control it.
I do find myself pricking up my ears to hear better, not always consciously.
FWIW, I can raise my eyebrows individually, flare my nostrils, twitch my nose, and also flex some muscle which pops my ears. Useless human tricks. Except popping my ears; super useful on airplanes.
On the other end, I have the ability to voluntarily move my big toe away from the other toes in the horizontal plane of the foot. Like splaying toes, but just swinging the big toe sideways while the others are at rest.
But, I can only do this on my right foot. It's like I have awareness of a muscle and tendon there that is just absent on the other foot. It was weird to realize this asymmetry at first when I was young.
> and also flex some muscle which pops my ears. Useless human tricks.
Also useful when you're diving. I can equalise without holding my nose for the first 10-15m, just by doing the thing with the ears. Doesn't work all the way down tho...
You trained it? I can wiggle each ear very visibly (and both). I hardly ever do but as I remember most people can’t. So i always assumed it was a DNA thing.
Not the person you're replying to, but is also trained myself to do it. I basically touched the area where the muscle is, tried to activate it ... time passes ... and some unconscious process figured it out. Now, as a responsible parent, I use my super power to troll my kids.
>> I can wiggle each ear very visibly (and both). I hardly ever do but as I remember most people can’t. So i always assumed it was a DNA thing.
After reading the article I think its a "use it or lose it" thing where the muscles and ability to control them atrophy in our modern environment. We have more competing sounds and external means to "turn up the volume" so we can hear a particular thing.
Someone recently told me that its genetic. Not everyone can control that muscle. I can, I learned it after seeing someone do it by lifting eye brows. I can control it without moving eyebrows now.
There's money here to whoever can capture the activation of these muscles to control prosthetic cat ears. At the rate I see them the prosthetic cat ear market must be double-digit billions.
Seriously, though, it makes me wonder if the activation of these muscles could be used in a hearing aid application. Why not add a couple rear-facing highly directional mics and use these muscles to control their gain?
There’s muscles in my ears that I have conscious control of that don’t really seem to do anything other than make a rumbling sound. They were fun to use when I was young playing, since I could make explosion sounds and get a realistic rumbling bass too. Are these the same muscles?
I can do this too. The article mentions it being “rare”, but it sounds like it hasn’t really been studied so might actually be common. From casual discussion with friends in the past I suspect it’s more like 30-50% of people.
As the article mentions, the tensor tympani muscles are also involved in hyperacusis, which is an inability to tolerate sound at volumes most people have no issue with.
One of my kids has this. The best analogy I've found is it is like standing out in the sun when you already have sunburn.
Oh, so that's what that is? Crazy. Subjectively (besides the sound) it just felt like a vague pressure in my head, near the neck, so I never could figure out what the hell it was I was doing.
I do this sometimes when my ears are congested and I’m trying not to do weird things with my jaw where people can see, to open up my Eustachian tubes. It works about a third of the time.
I have this weird muscle in my ears I can flex to block out (or at least lessen) loud noises. I've never been able to explain it adequately to anyone, or find out what is going on, but it's absolutely real and not just, wait for it, .. in my head :-)
In modern cars when the vehicle detects an impending collision it floods the cabin with pink noise to trigger a reflexive contraction of this muscle to protect the passenger's hearing from the even louder sounds of the collision and the airbags.
I can do the rumbling too. And a clicking too. I can even make someone else hear my ear clicking by having them press their ear to mine. I wonder if that's causes by the same thing.
Same here, I hear a rumbling. I do occasionally use this to block or lower very loud (potentially hearing-damaging) sounds if there are no other means available.
Had to scroll surprisingly far to find this comment thread. My ears sometimes react the same way on unexpected noises in a silent environment. However, I can not move my ears voluntarily, none at all.
There's a lot of stuff that does something after we thought it didn't. I don't quite trust folk when they say "Oh, that's just there in your body but it doesn't do anything."
I get that some stuff genuinely doesn't because evolution deprecated it, but others we might not yet understand well enough to know this for sure.
My favorite – this is to some degree my interpretation though! – my favorite is the default mode network, a kind of constellation of brain activity.
It’s called the default mode network because they found it through magnetic resonance imaging or something like this, and this activity pattern was the first pattern they saw!… A-ha! This is the default mode network! The default! The default mode! Yes!… the activity pattern in the brain of a human who has been persuaded to go into a very tight-fitting tube and is there all alone and it’s not pleasant.
The default mode is activated during introspection and social isolation and among the things it does is generate the sensation of being something which is distinctly not part of the rest of the world.
I'm not one to typically have strong fear/anxiety responses in situations that aren't actually dangerous. However, I felt extremely uncomfortable being partially inserted into an MRI tube for a lower body scan. I couldn't imagine being shoved head first into that thing without being heavily sedated or completely knocked out.
it’s not the first nor the last time wish that communities would not refrain from changing terminology. fitness is as important as accuracy and we shouldn’t be wary of dropping such inaccuracies, especially when they bring such strong connotations.
On the theme: The phrase "junk" DNA always irritated me. I'm glad it is being replaced with "non-coding".
Anybody who has looked at a 4kb demo can intuit that "junk" code likely has a function, even if it isn't immediately obvious machine code for the host CPU. I'm no geneticist, and I understand cells aren't CPUs, but I've read enough to know there's at least a tenuous analogy to non-coding DNA and the kind of "junk" you might find reversing a 4kb demo that procedurally generates its output.
Yup, DNA turned out to not merely be a sequence of triplets telling a dumb matter printer which hard-coded proteins to make - at least according to what little I understand of evolutionary developmental biology[0], DNA is much more like procedural generation in gamedev or demoscene. That is, there's plenty of recipes for various structures and body parts, and then there's lots of DNA that's responsible for conditionally enabling or disabling or modulating those recipes, depending on more DNA that controls when and where and how much to enable them, and then more - a complex network of logic.
--
[0] - Didn't get much further than this four-minute intro to the field, but it is a good intro: https://youtu.be/ydqReeTV_vk.
(EDIT: It's actually the second part of a trio, that starts with a four-minute bottom-up overview of organic chemistry[1], and ends on a three-minute intro to nanotechnology[2]. I recommend the series together for how well it frames humans in relation to other life and universe as a whole.)
>> I don't quite trust folk when they say "Oh, that's just there in your body but it doesn't do anything."
If you expand that to "You don't need that" it covers the appendix, spleen, tonsils, wisdom teeth (even incisors can be removed to make room) and probably some other things. I'm in favor of keeping all your parts unless absolutely necessary, as all of these things seem to have at least marginal purpose.
1. They used to yank everyone’s tonsils at any provocation. There was a swing back to trying never to take them. I wish my pediatrician would’ve had mine removed after my nth tonsillitis so I didn’t have to have them out in my 30s. That was fun.
2. Having had an emergency appendectomy, I’m sympathetic to the notion of proactively snipping them any time you happen to be in there anyway. Getting a hernia fixed? Oh hey, let’s grab the appy while we’re at it!
I would expect at least some evolutionary pressure to get rid of unused things in your body. Let's just take the appendix as an example because it's probably the most common "you don't actually need this" thing that people know about.
Some appendixes burst. Sometimes this kills people. Sometimes this happens before that person has been able to reproduce. Wouldn't this cause selection for people who at the very least don't have bursting appendixes (appendices just sounds wrong to my inner narrator in this context), but also for people who have smaller ones. Over time this pressure would decrease but shouldn't it theoretically over many many generations result in smaller and smaller, eventually disappearing, appendixes?
Whether a thing can be selected-out depends on the shape of the fitness landscape in the environment.
For example, appendix-bursts are clearly rare enough and treatable-enough that they cannot be selected-out in modern humans. (But almost nothing can if almost everyone is able to reproduce, and any selection effects will be driven by the number of children which is largely cultural.)
If a thing hasn't been selected out, you can roughly conclude either that:
1. The selection pressure to do so isn't strong. Either few appendix bursts occur in an ancestral env, or they don't disrupt reproduction bc they happen later in life, or are treatable, or other causes of death kick in before the appendix matters.
2. Or, if the selection pressure is strong, there is "nowhere to go" in gene-space that improves this aspect of fitness, within the search-radius. (Which is really equivalent to 1: the selection pressure isn't strong enough to search widely enough)
3. Or there is a stronger selection pressure for it, even if you can't figure out what it is, like the "backup gut bacteria" thing for the appendix. (Which is actually equivalent to 1/2 also: the selection pressure isn't strong enough to find a way to separate the upside from the downside)
We used to think tonsils are optional as well, and there seem to have been some studies that find a link between tonsillectomy & Crohn's, Hodgkin's or even breast cancer (from wikipedia).
There surely must be vestigial parts in our organisms, like the one in the article, but more often than not we have no fucking clue how they interconnect with the whole and what their function is.
Appendix is being appreciated these days as a reservoir of good gut bacteria. So there’s actually probably some pressure to keep it around. Appendicitis is a thing but of course not everyone suffers it. Maybe in the primitive world you were more likely to see your skull meet a rock before that happened in significant numbers of people in the population to the point it affected offspring counts.
I would think so. Who says that's not happening now? It seems reasonable that evolutionary pressure can be strong enough to have a significant impact in 1-2 generations (for example due to the introduction of a new environmental threat) or weak enough to take thousands of generations.
Agreed. There is, or at least were, some parts of the body that were only recently discovered and not just known about and assumed to be inactive. It was only in 2015 that lymphatic vessels were discovered in the central nervous system:
Man, does THAT sum up the current political climate in America.
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."[97]
A lot of this comes from the assumption that our organs each have a single purpose, so if the obvious purpose is not relevant in humans then the organ is useless. But most organs serve multiple purposes.
There is no grand design in biology. If something ain’t broke, evolution ain’t going to fix it. Retina in mammals facing backwards that gives rise to blind spot is one example. The laryngeal nerve that goes all the way down aorta and back up the neck is another
Also, if something truly serves no purpose, evolution will allow it to go away.
The classic example is the enzyme needed to make vitamin C. In our primate ancestors that lived on a diet rich in vitamin C, there was no penalty to losing this enzyme. Mutations that destroyed its function were not selected against. As a result, we now can't make vitamin C; the remnants of the gene for the enzyme have been so damaged that there's no path back to the working version.
He mentions that even if you're a giraffe, you have nerves just as long running to the end of your spine, and from your spint to the bottoms of your feet, so the extra length of nerve isn't really a problem.
Not exactly. Everything in our body needs energy to maintain itself. It has to provide some value for the energy it consumes, otherwise not having it becomes an evolutionary advantage meaning evolution will gravitate towards it.
Eh evolution will certainly try to fix things that ain't broke, indeed it will try to vary just about everything at some point or another. Bad cable management remains because no one survives the intermediate steps between functional configuration A and optimal configuration Z.
Tonsils are a good example of this. New studies are finding that they may be part of the immune system. Anecdotally, I had mine removed as a child due to frequent tonsilitis. As an adult, I suffer from a number of airborne allergies. Most likely a coincidence, but it does make me wonder!
Evolution works on a different timescale than what science divulgation headlines, and selected lineages to care about how to cross deadly valleys even though they might have appeared rarely. There's little room for baggage.
Yep, evolution leaves behind things that were once useful, but sometimes those traits could still have some kind of latent function that we just don’t have the tools to detect yet
My grandfather managed to persuade me when I was 4 that beer comes out of man's nipples. Unfortunately, at the time he was supposedly too old for it to happen. And my father was too young. So, I've never seen it in action
Readit News
Weird phenomenon.
Remember; Pain is weakness leaving the body.
seek the wave, grasshopper.
I do find myself pricking up my ears to hear better, not always consciously.
FWIW, I can raise my eyebrows individually, flare my nostrils, twitch my nose, and also flex some muscle which pops my ears. Useless human tricks. Except popping my ears; super useful on airplanes.
But, I can only do this on my right foot. It's like I have awareness of a muscle and tendon there that is just absent on the other foot. It was weird to realize this asymmetry at first when I was young.
Also useful when you're diving. I can equalise without holding my nose for the first 10-15m, just by doing the thing with the ears. Doesn't work all the way down tho...
If you have cats and make a noise behind the ears automatically swivel back. I guess we must have something live that in our evolutionary past.
And like OP I eventually managed to control one ear (right) but not the other, even to this day 40 years later
After reading the article I think its a "use it or lose it" thing where the muscles and ability to control them atrophy in our modern environment. We have more competing sounds and external means to "turn up the volume" so we can hear a particular thing.
I find it very distracting personally.
Seriously, though, it makes me wonder if the activation of these muscles could be used in a hearing aid application. Why not add a couple rear-facing highly directional mics and use these muscles to control their gain?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_tympani_muscle
I can do this too. The article mentions it being “rare”, but it sounds like it hasn’t really been studied so might actually be common. From casual discussion with friends in the past I suspect it’s more like 30-50% of people.
What kind of muscle can switch between voluntary or involuntary depending on the person?
One of my kids has this. The best analogy I've found is it is like standing out in the sun when you already have sunburn.
In modern cars when the vehicle detects an impending collision it floods the cabin with pink noise to trigger a reflexive contraction of this muscle to protect the passenger's hearing from the even louder sounds of the collision and the airbags.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/pink-noise-says-prepare-for-impact
So apparently we can control our tensor tympani muscle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_tympani_muscle
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_tympani_muscle
I get that some stuff genuinely doesn't because evolution deprecated it, but others we might not yet understand well enough to know this for sure.
It’s called the default mode network because they found it through magnetic resonance imaging or something like this, and this activity pattern was the first pattern they saw!… A-ha! This is the default mode network! The default! The default mode! Yes!… the activity pattern in the brain of a human who has been persuaded to go into a very tight-fitting tube and is there all alone and it’s not pleasant.
The default mode is activated during introspection and social isolation and among the things it does is generate the sensation of being something which is distinctly not part of the rest of the world.
it’s not the first nor the last time wish that communities would not refrain from changing terminology. fitness is as important as accuracy and we shouldn’t be wary of dropping such inaccuracies, especially when they bring such strong connotations.
Anybody who has looked at a 4kb demo can intuit that "junk" code likely has a function, even if it isn't immediately obvious machine code for the host CPU. I'm no geneticist, and I understand cells aren't CPUs, but I've read enough to know there's at least a tenuous analogy to non-coding DNA and the kind of "junk" you might find reversing a 4kb demo that procedurally generates its output.
--
[0] - Didn't get much further than this four-minute intro to the field, but it is a good intro: https://youtu.be/ydqReeTV_vk.
(EDIT: It's actually the second part of a trio, that starts with a four-minute bottom-up overview of organic chemistry[1], and ends on a three-minute intro to nanotechnology[2]. I recommend the series together for how well it frames humans in relation to other life and universe as a whole.)
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8FAJXPBdOg
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObvxPSQNMGc
If you expand that to "You don't need that" it covers the appendix, spleen, tonsils, wisdom teeth (even incisors can be removed to make room) and probably some other things. I'm in favor of keeping all your parts unless absolutely necessary, as all of these things seem to have at least marginal purpose.
1. They used to yank everyone’s tonsils at any provocation. There was a swing back to trying never to take them. I wish my pediatrician would’ve had mine removed after my nth tonsillitis so I didn’t have to have them out in my 30s. That was fun.
2. Having had an emergency appendectomy, I’m sympathetic to the notion of proactively snipping them any time you happen to be in there anyway. Getting a hernia fixed? Oh hey, let’s grab the appy while we’re at it!
Some appendixes burst. Sometimes this kills people. Sometimes this happens before that person has been able to reproduce. Wouldn't this cause selection for people who at the very least don't have bursting appendixes (appendices just sounds wrong to my inner narrator in this context), but also for people who have smaller ones. Over time this pressure would decrease but shouldn't it theoretically over many many generations result in smaller and smaller, eventually disappearing, appendixes?
For example, appendix-bursts are clearly rare enough and treatable-enough that they cannot be selected-out in modern humans. (But almost nothing can if almost everyone is able to reproduce, and any selection effects will be driven by the number of children which is largely cultural.)
If a thing hasn't been selected out, you can roughly conclude either that:
1. The selection pressure to do so isn't strong. Either few appendix bursts occur in an ancestral env, or they don't disrupt reproduction bc they happen later in life, or are treatable, or other causes of death kick in before the appendix matters.
2. Or, if the selection pressure is strong, there is "nowhere to go" in gene-space that improves this aspect of fitness, within the search-radius. (Which is really equivalent to 1: the selection pressure isn't strong enough to search widely enough)
3. Or there is a stronger selection pressure for it, even if you can't figure out what it is, like the "backup gut bacteria" thing for the appendix. (Which is actually equivalent to 1/2 also: the selection pressure isn't strong enough to find a way to separate the upside from the downside)
We used to think tonsils are optional as well, and there seem to have been some studies that find a link between tonsillectomy & Crohn's, Hodgkin's or even breast cancer (from wikipedia).
There surely must be vestigial parts in our organisms, like the one in the article, but more often than not we have no fucking clue how they interconnect with the whole and what their function is.
I think. I'm not a doctor or anything.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lymphat...
That article is about mice, but they were later found in humans, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."[97]
The classic example is the enzyme needed to make vitamin C. In our primate ancestors that lived on a diet rich in vitamin C, there was no penalty to losing this enzyme. Mutations that destroyed its function were not selected against. As a result, we now can't make vitamin C; the remnants of the gene for the enzyme have been so damaged that there's no path back to the working version.
He mentions that even if you're a giraffe, you have nerves just as long running to the end of your spine, and from your spint to the bottoms of your feet, so the extra length of nerve isn't really a problem.
There has been a revolution in the understanding how this organelle works in the last few years.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089865682...
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