The left brain favors logic and the right brain favors intuition, and this difference may be related to the brain’s processing of sound. Thus, the right ear is more receptive to advice and the left ear is more receptive to sweet talk.
The right ear is more receptive to advice, while the left ear is more receptive to love talk
Usually when we listen to sounds, we rarely care whether it’s the left or the right ear. However, several scientific studies have shown that the left and right ears have their own “preferences” and “specialties”. Experiments by Italian scientists have found that the human right ear is “softer” and more likely to listen to advice and carry out orders. The same words, said to the right ear than to the left ear to hear more. But if you say sweet words, the situation is different, then the left ear may be more effective. Is this true? What is the principle? What is the new and interesting science around the ear?
The right ear advantage: The right ear listens more than the left
In a study published in the online edition of the German journal Nature Science, psychologists Luca Tomasi, Daniele Marzoli and colleagues at the University of Chieti in Italy conducted a series of experiments on how people listen and react during social activities. The results showed that the human brain processes sounds heard in both ears differently, with information received in the right ear being prioritized and commands received being more likely to be carried out – the “right ear advantage.
The researchers noted that even when both ears are stimulated with the same sound, people prefer to listen with the right ear, and syllables entering the right ear are prioritized by the left hemisphere. Previous research has found that the left hemisphere innervates the nerves and organs of the right hemisphere and is the language center, responsible for verbal, analytical, logical, algebraic thinking, understanding, and behavior; the right hemisphere innervates the nerves and organs of the left hemisphere and is the “dumb brain” without a language center, but has a center for receiving music, and is responsible for visual, geometric, drawing, and other
The right hemisphere innervates the left half of the body and is a “mute brain” without a language center, but has a center for receiving music, and is responsible for visual, geometric, drawing, and other visual thinking.
In their article, Tomasi and Marzoli said, “These results are consistent with a different division of labor between the left and right brain hemispheres.” This is because the left hemisphere is more logical and better at “decoding” verbal information. They also analyzed that the human left and right hemispheres are responsible for positive and negative feelings and behaviors, so speaking into the right ear sends words to the more “submissive” part of the brain.
Another of their experiments also showed that the right ear could hear more words than the left ear.
According to the journal Brain and Behavior, they did an interesting experiment at a club in Pescara, Italy. When you’re in a dance club and the sound of electronic rock music is deafening all around you, a woman comes up to you, approaches and yells at you, “Can I have a cigarette?” Which ear she shouted at you, you give her the chance of cigarettes will be higher? The results of the experiment were that if she shouted at your right ear, the odds of you giving her a cigarette would be twice as high as if she shouted at your left ear. Of the 88 people who shouted into the right ear, 34 heard it and handed a cigarette, while only 17 of the 88 people who shouted into the left ear did so.
In addition, they also simply observed people interacting by, say, asking for a cigarette, but not speaking into a particular ear. The two Italian researchers had previously picked a nightclub setting because the loud music would allow the person asking for a cigarette to approach the other person and speak directly into a particular ear without making them feel strange. “What we are doing now is explaining the natural expression of hemispheric symmetries in the brain, showing their impact on daily human life, a field of study that has rarely been addressed.” Tomasi and Marzoli write in the article.
Speaking sweet nothings into the left ear is more likely to capture the heart of a beautiful woman
Traditional theory suggests that the left brain favors logic and the right brain favors intuition. Research by scientists at Sam Houston State University shows that if you speak sweetly into your girlfriend’s left ear, you’ll be more likely to hear her, and if you’re trying to talk to her, or if you’re trying to convey something non-emotional like an instruction, you’ll be more likely to speak into your right ear. So, if you want to communicate your love message more effectively, remember the secret of “talking in your left ear”.
The study invited 100 men and women to be tested. In the experiment, the volunteers wore headphones as required. They heard multiple sets of words in their left and right ears through the headphones. Each group of words consisted of an emotional word and a neutral word, both of which were of the same syllable length and were pronounced simultaneously in the left and right ear without any emotional tone, and which word was on the left and which on the right was randomized. After listening to the words, they were asked to write down the words they had previously heard. The test results showed that the respondents could distinguish and remember more than 70% of the emotional words they heard from the left ear, such as love, kissing and passion, but when they listened to the same words with the right ear, they could only remember 58% of the content. The study, published in the American journal Hormones and Behavior, concluded that sweet words spoken into a lover’s left ear are more likely to capture his or her heart. In this study, scientists also found that the left ear is equally capable of perceiving jokes and anecdotes than the right ear.
In addition, researchers surveyed 30 young men, measured their blood pressure, heart rate, and hormone levels when they were angry, and then talked to them in their left and right ears, respectively. The results found that the left ear basically did not listen to persuasion, the indicators basically did not change; the right ear after listening to persuasion, anger has slowed down, but if the noise from the right ear, it is possible to make him more angry. The study concluded that the right ear is more likely to listen to persuasion because the right ear hears the information transmitted to the left brain. In that case, for the other person to listen to what you want, speak into his right ear.
Neurophysiologist Xin Zhuoqiang, who was responsible for the study, noted, “The study strongly suggests that people have a stronger memory for love words heard in the left ear. The results also fit the role of the right side of the human brain, which is responsible for receiving emotional information.”
The left and right ears have the same function, but the difference is in the division of labor between the left and right brain
Physiologically, the structure and function of the left and right ears are the same, and the reason for the difference in “listening” is that scientists speculate that the difference is in the brain’s response. A series of studies have shown that sounds coming in from the left and right ears are processed differently in the brain.
Noting that syllables heard in the right ear tend to dominate in the brain when given equal stimulation in both ears, the researchers went on to hypothesize that auditory information coming in from the right ear preferentially enters the left half of the brain, which is where much of the language processing takes place. And accordingly, information entering from the left ear is predominantly transmitted to the right brain. Some researchers have also found through experiments that the right ear is responsible for lip-syncing clicks like speech, while the left ear responds sharply to soothing tones like music. This shows some consistency with the left brain being responsible for logical thinking and the use of language and the right brain being responsible for intuitive, holistic thought processing.
Scientists studying infant hearing have also previously found that the right ear is better at listening to sounds like words and the left ear is better at listening to music. The study was published in the journal Science. University of California scientist Yvonne Sinninger, who led the study, and her colleagues studied the hearing of more than 3,000 newborns, specifically the tiny “amplifiers” on the hair cells in the outer layer of their inner ear canal. These cells are able to contract and amplify to amplify the sound vibrations that carry sound waves to nerve cells and then to the brain. The researchers put microscopic probes that emit two different sounds into the babies’ ears to measure the amplification of sound waves. They found that sounds such as speech were more significantly amplified in the right ear, while sounds such as music were more amplified in the left ear. Study co-author Barbara Cohen-Wesson of the University of Arizona said, “The study shows that even a newborn’s ear can distinguish between different types of sounds and send it to the appropriate place in the brain.”
If that’s true, then it’s a great idea to use the right and left ears according to their hearing strengths. For example, for learning English and a second foreign language, hearing in the right ear can work well.
Question: What the right ear hears is not necessarily advanced to the left brain
The physiological mechanisms by which the left and right ears are biased towards what they hear have never been established.
For example, the hypothesis given by researchers that the right ear hears more than the left ear is that the auditory system in the right ear has priority access to the left hemisphere of the brain, where much of the brain’s language processing takes place. This explanation sounds logical because the left and right hemispheres of the brain are connected in opposite ways to the two sides of the body, yet does it follow from this that language entering the right ear is processed by the left brain?
I’m afraid it’s not that simple.
In an exclusive interview, Professor Zhang Shizhong, deputy director of neurosurgery at Zhujiang Hospital, described the surgical difficulty of auditory neuroma as the most difficult of all neurosurgical procedures. The auditory neuroma is located in the area of the angle between the pontine brain (part of the brainstem) and the cerebellum, a complex structure with thick blood vessels and very important nerves, and a slight inadvertence during surgery can directly compress the brainstem and stop the heart. He said that in terms of the nervous system, there are external “calls” that come in through the auditory nerve, the brain and brainstem are the processing centers, external nerves such as the spinal cord are the “telephone lines” that conduct, and the peripheral areas such as the hands and feet are equivalent to the end of the phone, and the “calls” to the brain are not the same. The peripheral areas, such as the hands and feet, respond to the “calls” from the brain. Usually, we think of the left brain as “calling” the right side of the body and the right brain as “calling” the left side of the body. But in the case of the ear, this is not necessarily the case. “Anatomically, the auditory nerve in the right ear enters the skull and goes directly to the right brainstem, and the auditory nerve in the left ear goes directly to the left brainstem.” He said. In other words, the ipsilateral auditory nerve enters the ipsilateral brainstem and then both project bilaterally; there is no mere left-right crossover. And later, they then converge in the nucleus of the auditory nerve in the brainstem. In this way, from the perspective of a neurosurgeon, I’m afraid the hypothesis that the so-called right auditory system enters the left hemisphere preferentially is hardly valid.
Professor Zhang graphically added that the human brainstem is like a carrot, and many of the whiskers around it are auditory and other nerves that complement and cross each other, and the roles in between are often integrated, not in absolute one-to-one correspondence.
So the research on the right ear, the left ear, as an experiment and an exploration, is perhaps more interesting than scientific. But saying more sweet things to the left ear is no less fun for the love life.