Observations and results
Were two ears better than one in identifying distance and direction? Was direction more difficult to guess with one ear when you and your partner were closer to one another?

Each ear receives information that is sent to your brain. Because your ears are not side by side, they receive different information. If someone standing to your left claps his hands, your left ear will receive this sound wave more quickly than your right one. In addition, the clap will sound louder in your left ear than in your right . Your brain uses these differences to better understand where a sound is coming from. This can also explain why—as you may have noticed—it's hard to tell the difference between a sound directly in front of or behind you, even if you are using both ears. When the sound source is exactly equidistant to both ears, they receive very similar information and your brain has fewer clues as to where the source may be.

Cleanup
If indoors, remove tape from the floor.

More to explore
One Ear Is Not Like the Other, Study Finds from Scientific American
Our Sense of Hearing from Neuroscience for Kids
A Brain Map of Auditory Space from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Your Ears from KidsHealth
How Hearing Works from How Stuff Works

4 Comments

1. 1. promytius 03:41 PM 7/5/12

   oh! I put the tape on my ears! Maybe it's my eyes I should evaluate. Thanks for a great, practical science lesson - I wish more people thought about things this way.

   Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this

2. 2. Alenz 09:20 PM 7/5/12

   Using the two ' ears ',we do a kind of mental triangulation on from where come the sound

   Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this

3. 3. neurothing 09:00 AM 7/6/12

   Whiel simple audio demos are always useful teaching tools, theere are some significant problems with this post.
   
   1) Humans have 6 senses not five. The vestibular sense (balance) is a separate sense.
   2) Using an earplug, which attentuates but doesn't block sound nearly as well as a hand covering the ear, will distort sound localization, not demonstrate monoaural (one eared) localization.
   3) The differences in localization (time of arrrival vs loudness) are not for all sounds. Time of arrival is only for low frequency sounds. Intensity difference is for high frequency sounds.

   Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this

4. 4. TobyTobin 05:49 PM 7/11/12

   I was disappointed in the article because most of it was devoted to an experiment for hearing horizontal directivity that most people already know. It did not explain how vertical directivity works. I don't know.

   Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this