Working in Movement

Unless we've been injured or born that way, most of us have two arms, two eyes and two ears. It has long been known that we can use each of our hands or eyes differently. You can be right-handed or a southpaw like me. And like handedness, you might use each of your eyes differently, as in the idea of a dominant eye. But until now, the assumption has been that there's not much differenece between how we use each of our two ears. A new bit of research described in The Right Ear is From Mars challenges that notion, providing evidence that the each ear processes certain types of sounds differently.

The research was done at the University of Arizona, which tested the hearing in thousands of infants using a special apparatus. The researchers found the right ear of the infants produced a greater response to sounds resembling speech, while the left ear responds more to tones representing music. By itself, this finding is interesting and implies things like helping accurately select which ear to place cochlear implants. But beyond its medical implications, this new research sheds light on some older investigations:

In other studies, researchers have found that children with hearing loss in the right ear tend to have more problems in school than children who are deaf in the left ear. The new findings suggest that the right ear is critical for learning situations.

The use (and misuse) of the eyes has been an important part of the educational process for each of us. It's turning out that the use of the ears impacts the quality of our educational process.