Favorite ear
 

Right or left?


I'd say right myself.

Tinnitus?

I think I have one permanent tinnitus since I was born, but it's in both ears. And I don't really know if it's really tinnitus. I just keep on hearing this 19 000 Hz or so frequency whenever I'm in a quiet environment (ie lying in my bed, in the dark, alone, at night), which could be tinnitus indeed ; but then I read this thing about how John Cage had visited an anechoic chamber once and said he could still always hear two sounds, one ultra high pitched and one super low pitched, and the engineer of the room told him the high pitched one was the noise made by his nervous system, while the low pitched one was the noise made by the blood in his veins. So the sound I keep on hearing might just be my nervous system? I don't know - John Cage said he was sceptical about what the engineer said.
Anyway, I've been hearing this sound since I was born (or at least, since my most early childhood memories...), and it doesn't really bother me - I don't even hear it unless I'm in a totally quiet situation.

neato
looks a bit like an evil chaos

i can move them separately, but i prefer my left ear since the right one is always the first to get temporary tinnitus crap.

That white thing really does look like a Chao.. what is that?

Right, the left one can get a little wonky sometimes.

right, because sometimes i feel throbbing pain in my left tragus which sweeps me off my feet.

Interesting fact - I'm actually completely deaf in my right ear. Long story short - as a baby I had 22 ear infections in one year, 3 sets of tubes as a young child the hole in my eardrum from the tube in my right ear expanded into one giant gap instead of healing properly, my first replacement eardrum i had done when i was 18 burst and lots of fluid went down to my hearing nerve (completely destroying that hearing nerve so my deafness is now irreversable), i had another replacement eardrum made and tube put in there but my hearing is pretty much fucked...hearing aids do shit because i'm so fucking deaf. everything i hear comes from the left side.

tragic and ironic because i'm such an auditory person.

Of course, Sonic Youth factors into this story of my deafness. I first noticed that something was truely fucked up about my hearing when, about six months after my first replacement eardrum, I was listening to Experimental Jet Set (an album which I had listened to hundreds upon hundreds of times) and started to realize that I was no longer hearing all of the noise . Notes and riffs that I knew by heart had simply gone missing. I thought I was either going crazy or too high to function but it turns out I had completely lost all hearing.

Lame.

Hopefully my left ear won't blow out soon....

right ear.. i think its like this for most people

Labyrinthitis.

a
n
u
s

p
o
o

vote for me

Becoming deaf is actually one of my greatest fears in life. I could imagine myself not smelling anything, not seeing anything, but I couldn't imagine myself in a totally silent world. I think I'd go crazy.
I know it could appear as contradictory to the fact that I never wear earplug on concerts, for instance - though I might begin to do it, as I realized it doesn't alter the sound quality as much as I thought it did -, but I try to be careful about it - I never listen to music too loud for instance, especially when I'm on headphones.
Seriously.

Yup...it was also one of my worst fears before. It's something that I've grown to live with. I've been legit half deaf since I was nineteen at this point...and to be perfectly honest, it's not as awful as it might sound. I was able to find a set of headphones where everything is channeled into the left earphone. I mostly listen to music on stereo and just kind of think of headphones as being kind of a teaser.

Just put a banana in year ear. Put a ripe banana right into your favorite ear...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFCSXr6qnv4

Whichever one I've damaged the least... so I think the right.

Left because right now my right ear has been plugged with water for hours

left. my right ear hurts constantly... but it's not it's fault, my jaw is ... uh ... inexplicably ouch.

Requests to the Right Ear Are More Successful Than to the Left

• By Alexis Madrigal
   
  
• June 23, 2009 |
• 5:59 pm |
• Categories: Brains and Behavior

 

You’re in a loud and sweaty Italian dance club when a woman approaches you. To be heard over the techno, she leans in close and yells into your ear, “Hai una sigaretta?”
If she spoke into your right ear, you would be twice as likely to give her a cigarette than if she asked by your left ear, according to a new study that employed this methodology in the clubs of Pescara, Italy. Of 88 clubbers who were approached on the right, 34 let the researcher bum a smoke, compared with 17 of 88 whom she approached on the left.
“The present work is one of the few studies demonstrating the natural expression of hemispheric asymmetries, showing their effect in everyday human behavior,” write psychologists Daniele Marzoli and Luca Tommasi of the University G. d’Annunzio in Italy in the journal Naturwissenschaften.
It’s the latest in a series of studies that show that sound from both human ears is processed differently within the brain. Researchers have noted that humans tend to have a preference for listening to verbal input with their right ears and that given stimulus in both ears, they’ll privilege the syllables that went into the right ear. Brain scientists hypothesize that the right ear auditory stream receives precedence in the left hemisphere of the brain, where the bulk of linguistic processing is carried out.
What’s surprising about the study is that ear choice had such a decided impact on the behavior of participants in a natural, or as the researchers put it, ecological, setting. Why would people feel more generous when their right ears are addressed?

Marzoli and Tommasi write that some work has shown that the left and right hemispheres of the brain appear to be tuned for positive and negative emotions, respectively. Talk into the right ear and you send your words into a slightly more amenable part of the brain.
“These results seem to be consistent with the hypothesized differential specialization of right and left hemispheres,” they write.
In addition to the direct cigarette-ask study, they also simply observed people interacting and also asked for cigarettes without directing their requests towards a particular ear. The Italian researchers picked the night club setting because the loud music allowed the cigarette-asker to approach people and speak directly into one ear without seeming “odd.”
While the liquored-up setting might seem unconventional, they view their work in a real life setting as a valuable counterbalance to highly artificial in-lab psychological studies.
“[W]e would finally like to add that it is of utmost importance, in times of massive use of imaging techniques (that by definition impose severe constraints on the observation of neural activities in freely acting subjects) to continue to provide ecological evidence of brain functioning,” they conclude.




http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/06/earcigarette