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CrowdScience: How do my ears sense direction?

Discussion & Talk

Boy with hands at his ears

12/04/2024 GMT

How do my ears sense direction?

BBC World Service - CrowdScience, How do my ears sense direction?

How can we hear a sound and immediately know where it’s coming from?

How do we hear a sound and immediately know where it’s coming from? Anand Jagatia finds out what makes left, right, up and down sound so different.

How do we know where a sound is coming from? 

Another chance to hear this ear-opening episode, exploring a question from CrowdScience listener Chiletso. One day, he heard his son bounce a ball and instantly knew the direction it was travelling. How? 

Anand Jagatia sets out to discover what makes left, right, up and down sound so different. 

First, he gets blindfolded, so Alan Archer-Boyd, former auditory scientist and lead engineer at BBC R&D, can put his sound localisation skills to the test. It turns out that having two ears and pinnae, those flappy bits of cartilage on the side of your head, help a lot. 

Professor Eric Knudsen shares how the barn owl’s asymmetrical ears allow it to hunt mice, even in complete darkness. 

And Anand uncovers how far he can push his own spatial hearing. Blind activist and researcher Thomas Tajo teaches him how to echolocate like a bat, and Dr Lore Thaler explains what is going on in the brain of experienced echolocators. 

This programme was originally broadcast in March 2023. 

Presented by Anand Jagatia 
Produced by Florian Bohr for the BBC World Service 

Image: Boy with hands at his ears 
Credit: Silke Woweries/Getty Images

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