Ear muscle we thought humans didn't use activates when people listen hard

Keep at it, those ear muscles will be benching solid steel glasses in no time!

Remember; Pain is weakness leaving the body.

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 ?

Yup I have the same issue with the aching muscles.

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.

There was a movie where Jack Black does the wave with his eyebrows.

seek the wave, grasshopper.

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...

If you can’t will your ears to pop, here’s the manual way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valsalva_maneuver

I have a lot of trouble on airplanes. How did you learn to do that?

I've always been able to wiggle my ears, but just today I learned if I focus I can do one at a time. I'm 33. Thanks for the useless new skill!

Me too but it annoys no one I know. Best use case is when I need more bass in my IEM's.

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 too trained it when I was in primary school after seeing a class mate do it.

And like OP I eventually managed to control one ear (right) but not the other, even to this day 40 years later

>> 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.

It could be both

Same here and I always sort of assumed this was a normal thing of the human body. I'm kinda shocked to learn that many people can't do it.

What kind of muscle can switch between voluntary or involuntary depending on the person?

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 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.

According to the Wikipedia article it may be involuntary.

Same. Wonder how common this is.

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.

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.

this is so interesting.

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.

So this activity pattern could actually be the claustrophobia mode network?

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.)

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8FAJXPBdOg

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObvxPSQNMGc

You might enjoy the book Junk DNA by Nessa Carey. Very interesting how complex and interrelated our DNA is. Pretty much spaghetti code.

I generally agree, but:

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!

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)

Can we be sure that we don't need the appendix ?

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.

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.

for me, appendix / appendixes (organ) / appendices (to a book) too, just like index / indexes (database) / indices

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]

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.

Informative X thread on how the recurrent laryngeal nerve path is dictated by having to develop embryos through chemotaxis: https://x.com/culpable_mink/status/1850937701518000383

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.

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

Idk man, survival seems like a pretty blunt selection force for such an intricate mechanism

There are some fascinating stories about kids abducted and raised by wolves - who, when they were eventually found and brought back into human society, showed seemingly "superhuman" senses of hearing and smell. The senses became more normal the longer they spent time in human society however.

Not sure how credible those stories are, but if they are, this would indicate that human senses are a lot more flexible than we believe they are.

One of my favorite examples is the possibility of humans to have magnetoreception.

I've gotten at least two people (youths) to be able to raise a single eyebrow by placing their finger on their eyebrows and feeling their muscles activate as they raise and lower both eyebrows. Keeping your fingers on the eyebrow muscles, it's almost like your brain can start to "see" the two distinct muscles. It didn't take them too long (days not weeks, not hours) to be able to raise an eyebrow.

There's probably a biological component to it to, I'm not saying this will work for everyone because it didn't work for my spouse.

They taught us the appendix was one such organ. Now they are thinking it actually has a use and is not at all vestigial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appendix_(anatomy)#Maintaining...

What, if you learn about something at school it is automatically true? The same criticism applies there too. They were calling things like the appendix vestigial when it obviously isn't. People made a big deal about how it doesn't do anything and then it turns out it does something. Who'd have guessed. The so-called vestigial organs probably all have uses. I'd have a much easier time believing most of them do than none of them. Otherwise evolution would have done a much better job of weeding them out.

A 1% reduction in body mass is a huge advantage evolutionary, especially since rather than being cut completely that mass could be repurposed as more muscle for competing or more fat for lean times. For something in very recent evolutionary history (talking the last few thousand years), yeah sure the pressure might not have optimised a wasted organ out. But for any random organ? Nah, they probably have a purpose and we don't know what it is yet. Otherwise there is a big advantage to removing 'useless' bits. Evolutionary processes do however love little random tweaks and whatnot because they serve a useful purpose in weird edge cases and it is much more likely we're looking at one of them in any particular case.

Evolutionary pressure also would select for not wasting energy on a useless organ.