About one in five people can wiggle their ears—while the rest watch in non-wiggly envy. But what makes this skill possible for some and impossible for others? Ear movement is controlled by the ...

The superior auricular muscles were activated more in the medium mode than in the easy mode and were “very active” through the difficult mode.

In the hardest test, both background clips were made louder. The researchers found that the largest auricular muscle, the superior auricular muscle, became most activated during the difficult test.

This correlated with the superior auricular muscles’ activity levels: they didn’t activate more during the medium mode than during the easy mode, but were very active during the difficult mode.

Previous research had already linked activity in the posterior and superior auricular muscles (the largest auricular muscles) to attentive listening, suggesting that our primate ancestors used ...

By comparison, the activity of the superior auricular muscles wasn't affected by the direction of the sound. But as the listening challenge grew more difficult, these muscles became much more active.

The results revealed that the superior auricular muscles (SAM) were more active in the most difficult listening test versus the easier two, which were not significantly different from each other ...

An ear muscle called the superior auricular muscle, which sits just above the ear and lifts it up, fired up when the listening conditions were difficult, the researchers found.

This suggests that the activity of the superior auricular muscles could provide an objective measure of listening effort, although it's unclear if the muscle activity helps people hear.

“Placing Botox above the ear entails injecting it into the superior auricular muscle which normally would lift the ear when smiling,” she says. “By decreasing the function of the muscle with ...

About one in five people can wiggle their ears—while the rest watch in non-wiggly envy. But what makes this skill possible for some and impossible for others? Ear movement is controlled by the ...

But now researchers have found that these muscles do serve a function: they are activated when we are trying to listen to competing sounds. “There are three large muscles which connect the auricle to ...