Now, ever since I was a child, I mean, as long as I can remember, I have always used that part of the ear as an earplug. I can push it into the ear…hole? (that sounds so wrong) and it fills it perfectly, creating a perfect seal. It’s quite comfortable and cozy, really.
So, my questions: Am I normal? Is this what that part of the ear is in fact, “for”? I don’t see what evolutionary advantage that would offer, but I don’t see what disadvantage, either, so it could just “be”, of course. But still- is it common for people to use the method I described above? Googling “tragus”, “earplugs”, “natural” and “built in” in different combinations didn’t help.
Sub question: assuming not EVERYONE does this, which I’m pretty sure must be the case, are some people’s ears shaped in such a way (not sufficiently large tragus, or something similar, I guess) that this would be impossible? The tragus just can’t achieve a seal for physical reasons, IOW.
And…doing this isn’t actually BAD, is it?
thanks in advance,
For me, I can attenuate sound by pushing and holding the tragus down, but it is both more comfortable and more effective to simply insert my forefingers into my ear canals.
So no, I do not think this is what the tragus is “for”.
Mine isn’t long enough for that. Do you have really big ears? I can press it down with a finger and cover my ear canal with it, but to actually bend it and get it to stay in my ear canal is impossible.
Yes, actually. I have always thought that I had comically large ears.
But shouldn’t that not matter so much because the proportions of a human ear are more or less the same?
And- did you say you could get it to stay in your ear canal? As in “Look Ma, no hands!”? That I cannot do. Assuming you didn’t actually mean that, can you achieve a seal with it?
Sorry, my page down must have somehow skipped your post!
And I don’t know what I was thinking when I posted last, I was really all over the place. No one said anything that even remotely implied that they could get the tragus to stick (and stay) in the ear canal. My bad, my inexplicably poor reading skills. Apologies all around.
Belated thanks to you too, njtt! as my…dual taker? No, that’s not right. But you know what I mean. One of two.
Would still like to hear from others about their use of (or non-use of) the targus as an earplug.
-BB
The tragus, like the rest of the outer ear, interferes with incoming sound. This differential filtering effect (sounds coming from different locations hit different parts of the ear and are filtered in different ways) is used by auditory system to determine the location of sound sources.
I believe this is the answer. It’s a bit of strong cartilage that creates a “cup” to collect and direct sound waves into the ear canal. The shape of the human ear is what enhances our ability to locate sounds. Other animal ears, like cats, may have more voluntary control over movement of the ear to try to hone in on sound location, but humans can’t do that. (I seem to recall reading somewhere that humans are actually better at locating the direction of a sound than cats, although cats can hear quieter sounds than humans.)
Cats are thought to use the same mechanisms that humans do in this regard. mobile ears in cats mainly serve to amplify sound from directions of interest, though a localization function can’t entirely be ruled out.
Bamboo Boy, I can do that and have done it for as long as I can remember. Probably much longer but I believe I have lost much of my memory–kind of hard to tell, really. So at the very least, you’re no more of a freak than I am. For what that’s worth.
I think the evolutionary advantage of it making such a perfect seal is the comedic effect of rapidly opening & closing it when forced to listen to extraordinarily boring professors (or really bad loud music). Laughter being the best medicine, I’m sure it has cured more than one case of otherwise deadly malaise. Which is not to be confused with deadly Malaysians which, as I am led to believe, are not typically inclined to show extra mercy for those who fiddle with their own ears for whatever reason.
I didn’t realize that my ears were different from most peoples’ until ear buds came out. I’d stick them in and they’d fall right back out; yet I’d see people jogging with them in. Turns out, I’m one of those people who doesn’t have a ‘turned up’ part on the bottom of my ear, which holds in the ear bud. I was probably 40 before I learned that I was abnormal ::
Kindred spirit! It seems so natural to plug your ear that way when it ‘just works’ doesn’t it? I too do the open-close rapidly thing, I did it a lot as a child. I remember many times I’d be doing that, in my own world, laughing, only to realize that my mother was yelling at me “KNOCK IT OFF!!!”. Of course I did hear her, but through my kaleidoscopic auditory filter, her angry words just swirled into the pulsating auditory landscape, becoming non-language. It must have been some sight, me doing that weird thing cracking up while my mother, probably embarrassed, yelled at me.
On the contrary, if (as is certainly the case) mobile ears in cats serve to amplify sound from directions of interest, it beggars belief that they would not use that fact to aid in sound localization.
We poor humans can’t even tell if a sound is in front or behind us unless we move our whole head.* (Luckily, of course, we can, and do, do that.)
*Wightman, F.L. & Kistler, D.J. (1999). Resolution of Front–Back Ambiguity in Spatial Hearing by Listener and Source Movement. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (105 #5) 2841-2853.
Sole taker?
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