Which Animal Has The Most Extreme Sense of Hearing?

Our old friend, the bat, is the king of extreme hearing in the mammalian world. It uses echolocation, emitting ultrasonic sounds and measuring the length of time before the sounds echo back, in order to locate prey.

How Hearing Works

Hearing is complex, requiring a series of actions and reactions to work. The process involves many parts of the ear working together to convert sound waves into information the brain understands and interprets as sounds.

The Senses: Hearing

Words of love, or wisdom; the timeless murmur of wind in the trees; the warning blare of a car horn; the sublime harmonies of Mozart—our sense of hearing informs, enriches, and all too often disrupts our lives. It connects us to a world in motion.

Do blind people have better hearing?

How well a person can hear largely depends on how intact these hair cells are. Once lost, they don’t grow back – and this is no different for blind people. So blind people can’t physically hear better than others. Yet blind people often outperform sighted people in hearing tasks such as locating the source of sounds. The reason for this emerges when we look beyond the sensory organs, at what is happening with the brain, and how the sensory information is processed by it.

Don’t wear earphones all day – your ears need to breathe

If you need to listen for a prolonged period of time, using over-ear headphones may help a little. These offer a small amount of extra airflow compared to the in-ear earphones and earbuds. However, this is not as good as leaving the ears open to the outside air, and an accumulation of earwax can still occur.

How Our Brains Create Meaning From The Sounds Around Us

Well, you know, our brain does a really good job picking up what is going on in our sonic world. And so if we're getting garbled information, if we're getting information that has background noise, it's going to affect the signal that the brain hears in the first place.

How Sound Shaped The Evolution Of Your Brain

Acoustic biologists who have learned to tune their ears to the sounds of life know there's a lot more to animal communication than just, "Hey, here I am!" or "I need a mate."

How Your Ears Help You to See

New revelations that the brain's visual cortex processes sounds as well as sights.

Listening to nature: How sound can help us understand environmental change

Our hearing tells us of a car approaching from behind, unseen, or a bird in a distant forest. Everything vibrates, and sound passes through and around us all the time. Sound is a critical environmental signifier. Increasingly, we are learning that humans and animals are not the only organisms that use sound to communicate. So do plants and forests. Plants detect vibrations in a frequency-selective manner, using this “hearing” sense to find water by sending out acoustic emissions and to communicate threats.

Science Explains Why You Sometimes Can't Hear After You Orgasm

When I come really hard, I lose my hearing for a few minutes—and I'm not the only one. I asked an ear, nose, and throat surgeon why.

Spending more time in the dark could boost hearing in old age

Hope for non-invasive treatment for age-related deafness as scientists find neurons can compensate for disability at any age.

The noise all around us that’s destroying our hearing, explained

Let’s start at the beginning: How does all the noise erode our hearing in the first place? To grasp that, we need to walk through the fascinating machinery of the ear.

The senses: Hearing

When disruptions occur between our ears and our brain: we meet a company boss who hears his eyeballs moving and a charity worker whose spinning attacks last for hours.

What’s It Like for a Deaf Person to Hear for the First Time?

What I didn’t know was that cochlear implants don’t truly give you hearing. They create the perception of the sensation of sound by stimulating the auditory nerve using electrodes, which have a limited range of frequencies they can pick up. My perception of sound is more of a low-resolution hologram than the real stuff.

What’s the best sense?

Most of us have the fundamental five, and all of us have some that are more abstract. But which do we love best?

Which of the five senses do you value most? The answer may change as you age

We experience the world as a symphony of stimuli collected by the senses, though the influence of those various inputs changes over time.