How do my ears sense direction?
CrowdScience
BBC
4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 31 March 2023
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do we hear a sound and immediately know where it’s coming from?
That’s the question that CrowdScience listener Chiletso asked himself one day as he heard his son bounce a ball and instantly knew its direction. In this ear-opening episode, presenter Anand Jagatia sets out to discover what makes left, right, up and down, sound so different.
First, Anand gets blindfolded, so that Alan Archer-Boyd, former auditory scientist and lead engineer at BBC R&D, can put his sound localisation skills to the test. It turns out that having two ears and pinnae, those flappy bits of cartilage on the side of your head, help a lot.
Professor Eric Knudsen shares how the barn owl’s asymmetrical ears allow it to hunt mice, even in complete darkness.
And Anand uncovers how far he can push his own spatial hearing. Blind activist and researcher Thomas Tajo teaches him how to echolocate like a bat, and Dr Lore Thaler explains what is going on in the brain of experienced echolocators.
If you can, listen on headphones!
Presented by Anand Jagatia Produced by Florian Bohr for the BBC World Service
Image: Boy with hands at his ears Credit: Silke Woweries/Getty Images
Transcript
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| 0:16.0 | Simply doing your job, being a decent human being. |
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| 0:23.1 | their own light and that light is to be recognized by others. The long history of heroism with me, |
| 0:28.6 | Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. |
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| 0:39.0 | Something I don't think anybody has seen before. |
| 0:41.1 | It's a cyber criminal group. |
| 0:42.7 | From the BBC World Service. |
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| 0:48.2 | Find out more at the end of this podcast. |
| 0:52.6 | If you imagine that you have a lake, so imagine a lake in your mind. |
| 0:58.6 | Hello and welcome to crowd science from the BBC World Service. |
| 1:03.0 | I'm Ann Ann Jagatia and we're starting this show on your own personal desert island. |
| 1:09.2 | Imagine that you're standing on a tiny piece of land surrounded by a vast lake, calm and |
| 1:15.6 | serene. |
| 1:16.6 | On your right, a boat is making waves that slowly lap against the shore. |
| 1:24.6 | On your left, a tiny duck is paddling, producing small ripples on the smooth surface of the water. |
| 1:33.3 | And flowing into either side of your little island is a small channel, one on the left and one on the right, that the water is moving through. |
| 1:42.3 | How peaceful. |
... |
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