Comments: 288 +- Science: Need a Favor? Talk To My Right Ear on Wednesday June 24, @11:18PM
Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday June 24, @11:18PM
from the bene-gesserit-tricks dept.
from the bene-gesserit-tricks dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that scientists have found that if you want to get someone to do something, ask them in their right ear. Known as the 'right ear advantage,' scientists believe it is because information received through the right ear is processed by the left hand side of the brain which is more logical and better at deciphering verbal information than the right side of the brain. 'Talk into the right ear you send your words into a slightly more amenable part of the brain,' say researchers. The team, led by Dr. Luca Tommasi and Daniele Marzoli from the University of Chieti in central Italy, observed the behavior of hundreds of people in three nightclubs across the city where they intentionally addressed 176 people in either their right or their left ear when asking for a cigarette. They obtained significantly more cigarettes when they made their request in a person's right ear compared with their left. 'These results seem to be consistent with the hypothesized specialization of right and left hemispheres,' say researchers. 'We can also see this tendency when people use the phone, most will naturally hold it to their right ear.'"
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I hold my phone to my right ear (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't listen to anyone... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I don't listen to anyone... (Score:5, Funny)
"Talk to the hand"
Right or left hand?
Parent
Re:I don't listen to anyone... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, if you're a female, it doesn't matter which ear you talk into as long as you press your breasts into my arm when you make the request.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I am right handed and sometimes hold my phone to my left ear, so my right hand can be occupied in another way. Wait, that sounds gross. Uh, I was, uh, I was talking about writing things down. HONESTLY!
Re:I hold my phone to my right ear (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm obviously a whack job then. I hold my phone to my left ear because I'm right handed. Doesn't take all that much coordination to hold a phone up, so it's the lesser of two tasks. Job interviews over the phone for example require me to take notes (I can't write legibly with my left hand... or my right if you ask anyone else, but it's all relative...), and it's really more trouble than it's worth to reach across my keyboard and use my mouse with my left hand.
Parent
Re:I hold my phone to my right ear (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:I hold my phone to my right ear (Score:4, Funny)
A good wife doesn't talk to your right ear when she wants a favor, but your middle leg.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I hold my phone to my left ear (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:I hold my phone to my left ear (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm also deaf in one ear as a result of head trauma. I've found that with only one ear it's much more difficult to pick out individual voices in crowds, much how one loses depth perception with only one eye. With two ears the brain is apparently able to attenuate sounds based upon direction. In effect, having two ears gives your brain enough data to decode spatial multiplexing, similar to MIMO receiving antennas.
With just one ear the best you can do is frequency attenuation. This is why those with a certain vocal timbre are much easier to hear than others-- for example, the guy with the booming voice in the midst of a roomful of nasal mumblers. People who talk facing away are almost universally difficult to hear, as are those that continue to stand behind me on the weak side after I've told them not to. Some might think my habit of physically grabbing people by the shoulders and turning them around or moving them to the correct side after they do this two or three times is rather rude, but not nearly as rude as those speakers.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
gah, I'm going senile. write. right.
I'm never use too have this sort of problems... :-S
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I know what you mean. I'm a proud grammar nazi, but I've recently started messing up their/there (but not they're, must be the apostrophe). My keyboard sometimes sticks on o, so it looks like I mess up to/too too :P.
Re:I hold my phone to my right ear (Score:4, Funny)
Same here, but for some reason when playing baseball I always batted lefty even though I am right handed. Batting right handed never "felt right" to me.
Of course batting left handed I seemed to nail the pitcher in the nuts quite often and while he was in a fetal position holding his nuts it was trivial to get to first base, but I'm sure that was just a coincidence.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It might also have to do with your master eye. Just as you have a master hand, you actually focus more out of one eye, with the other providing mostly triangulation data (and of course extending your FOV, etc.). For MOST people, your master eye is the same as your master hand. There are some people who have opposites. There is a fairly simple test to determine which eye is your master, if you are curious google will explain how.
I'm personally right handed with a left master eye. When I'm doing anything that
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Correlation != Causality (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Seems like the classic example.
Classic in what way? I don't hear requests for cigarettes or change with either ear.
Re:Correlation != Causality (Score:5, Funny)
if you take to a soldier in the right ear as your going down the squad line
The following person not only remembers it, he's scarred for life.
Parent
I'm surprised (Score:2, Interesting)
this isn't common knowledge by now, I noticed this years ago when I started using cell phones (especially the old analog ones). With a lot of noise, I could hear the person on the other end better if I held the cell phone next to my right ear.
I wonder if handedness has any influence at all?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember that, years ago, we used to all say that American males were more deaf in their left ears from driving around with the windows open. Italians would be in the same situation. If this were true, then a test in the UK should find more bias in the opposite direction due to driving right-hand-drive cars.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My wife just asked why I was typing so fast and furious, so I explained the above comment to her. She said that she too hears better from her right ear than her left hear.
So maybe people just natura
Unconvinced (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unconvinced (Score:4, Insightful)
Correct the data for laterality (right hand preference in majority of the population), then maybe the results will be interesting. Even then, the explanation is bull. Unlike sight, the auditory system doesn't work cross-hemispherically. Sound from the right side is carried by the auditory nerve into the right portion of the temporal lobe.
What if it doesn't have to do with which ear is connected to what side of the brain but it is instead a visual cue (which is brain-sided) being picked up upon? If I stando to your right to talk to you, I might be having a psychological impact rather than a mechanical one.
What irritates me about so many of these types of research is that they seem to assume as a given that only because they concentrate in one part of a system this narrow focus automagically translates into isolation of the subject. How can you account for any other influences? Even if the subject is blind-folded, if the examiner is close enough the subject could still perceive the body heat. What if they wear ear phones with the balance tilted to the right or left, how do you account for the psychological factor of hearing on your preferred side over a purely mechanical explanation?
I think the phenomenon is interesting and worth studying, but the conclusion seems pretty suspect IMHO.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That is incorrect. The ascending fibers from the cochlear nuclei have decussating and non-decussating fiber bundles. The 'auditory nerve [sic]' is a far more complicated circuit than your post suggests.
Re:Unconvinced (Score:5, Interesting)
Ironic that in a post railing against jumping to conclusions, you know nothing about me and yet in two seconds flat come to the conclusion that I couldn't possibly know what I'm talking about.
Parent
Re:Unconvinced (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, I'm sure the scientists who conducted never bothered to look up how audio is introduced to the brain. I'm sure you're much smarter and better learned on the subject matter compared with them, just like every other /. genius who manages in two seconds flat to come up with exactly why a study is flawed despite it being outside of their area of expertise.
And this, children, is how you make an ad hominem attack.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
In short, WTF?
Double Blind? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Double Blind? (Score:5, Interesting)
That also strikes me as a terribly unscientific test... even in Italy, not everyone smokes, and even the ones who do may be out of cigarettes or in a location not conducive to smoking. did they also record the number of people who gave logical, but negative (ie. "I don't have any"), responses? What if they didn't ask for cigarettes until the end of the night, so they were in short supply?
What if people just got sick of them mooching and said no out of spite? As a former smoker, I can reasonably state that most are pretty generous to a point, but once you cross it they run out of sympathy very quickly... bumming cigarettes off of everyone you see can get you to that point very quickly.
Did they make sure to get an even mix of responses for males asking males, males asking females, females asking females and females asking males? Did they make sure not to have the person asking in left ears be the one with no social skills and bad breath? When I was a smoker, a cute girl had a MUCH better shot at getting a cigarette from me than, say, some whiny dude... given that this was done at nightclubs, and what many people actually go to nightclubs to (attemp to) do, this is actually a pretty major consideration that I somehow doubt they took into consideration.
And what the hell is with that sample size? 176 people? You went to 3 Italian nightclubs and could only find 176 smokers to ask for cigarettes between them? At least pretend you're trying to gather a statistically significant number of responses.
I'm not necessarily sure that they shouldn't have run any experiments simply because it is their hypothesis... but if they're going to claim some sort of success for it then they certainly need a better experiment than asking people for cigarettes at a nightclub. Honestly though, if nobody ever did scientists to test their own hypotheses, we'd probably still be in the Aristotelian phase of scientific concept.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Exactly!
To the left ear : "Yo, gimme some cigarette, fat bitch! Vaffanculo!"
To the right ear : "Sorry to interrupt, would you please consider giving me one cigarette? Grazie mille!"
from the bene-gesserit-tricks dept. (Score:3, Funny)
Advisers to the right, losers to the left (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Does that mean that Christianity has nothing to worry about, because no-one is ever going to listen to that devil who sits on their left shoulder? ;)
dextrocardia (Score:3, Interesting)
Riiiight... (Score:3, Insightful)
The method wasn't very scientificy, sample size was small and they skewed the results by "knowing" what kind of results they want.
I would have invented way more elaborate scheme to get an excuse to blow my grant money to nightclubbin
whether or not this is true (Score:5, Interesting)
it puts this story in hilarious contrast:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article3817270.ece [timesonline.co.uk]
i don't know how true all of this is, but there's all sorts of anecdotes like this
for example: women usually have their left breast a little larger than their right breast. regardless of which is larger, and regardless of handedness, women, and all simians in fact, and even breastless fathers, tend to hold their babies with their right arms to their left breast. this places the babies head on the left side of the body, putting the baby closer to the left side sensory inputs, which are governed by the right side of the brain, the more emotional side, thus establishing more of an emotional bond
so i don't know about all this ear stuff, but there seems to be something, at best subtle, that is real about side preference and emotions and logic
Left-handed (Score:3, Funny)
I hold my phone to the ear that doesn't require me to reach around my fucking face.
But meh. Maybe that's why I'm so short with stupid people on the telephone.
Here's for hearing you, kid... (Score:3, Funny)
It explains cars too! (Score:3, Funny)
...and this EVEN explains why most men do the driving - our wives, knowing the secret right ear thing, prefer to sit on the right, making us drive and simultaneously compelling us to do their bidding! ...or it could just be some bullshit theory where the data was cherry picked to make some sort of pop science conclusion.
Facts from the actual research article (Score:3, Interesting)
It may be too late in the discussion for this to get any notice, but I have access to the journal where this research was published and I thought I'd share a few details. In summary, it is much better science than the /. crowd seems to think, the researchers have done their homework, and I haven't seen any posts here that raise serious methodological issues that are not somehow addressed in the work. This wasn't just some guys hanging out in a night club asking for cigarettes.
Basically, they had three studies. The first was purely observational -- they "unobtrusively" observed interactions between people in the nightclub that started face-to-face and noted whether these progressed to talking in the right ear or the left ear. They adjusted for gender of speaker/listener, and other bias.
The second study (which they refer to as "quasi-experimental") involved a female aware of the study but unaware of the hypothesis who would approach subjects (equal # male and female) face-to-face and say something unintelligible. If the subject turned one ear, she would then ask for a cigarette in the ear they offered. She always asked the same question, and only asked people whom she had not seen smoking (to prevent social effects that might bias people toward sharing).
In the third study (also "quasi-experimental"), which is the one referred to most here, the female (still unaware of the hypothesis) now approached subjects from the front, but instead of allowing the subject to choose the ear, she selected left or right ear. Again, equal numbers of males/females were approached, and used the same question each time and still only approached subjects she had not seen smoking.
The second and third studies were performed at different times, so there's no effect of people getting sick of this chick bumming cigs, and there were a number of other controls. In the first study, there was a conclusion that there is significant bias toward offering a particular ear. In the second, there was no significant trend for complying with the request for a cigarette in right vs left ear. In the third, several trends were found -- the main result announced in the thread that the right ear resulted in more positive outcomes, and also (not surprisingly) that men were more likely to offer a cigarette to the female when asked.
Anyway, this is not junk science. There's a lot more to the study than the paragraph in the Telegraph told you about.
Re:It comes from (Score:2)
Re:Not enough data (Score:5, Informative)
Generally 176 is a sufficiently large sample for statistical purposes. There are methods to calculate how likely it is that the observed differences weren't just random luck. In other words, you can calculate the chance of getting the observed results when there is no real difference. When this chance (called a p-value) is low (one common significance level is 5%), you can conclude that it wasn't just luck and another factor was at work.
More stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis_test
Parent
Re:Not enough data (Score:5, Insightful)
Ugg, how is it that the parent is modded down but the GP is modded insightful? The GP is basically just saying "well, that doesn't feel like enough to me", while the parent points out accurately that it very easy to determine what the probability is that the results are due to chance. Since the article states that the researchers obtained "significantly" more cigarettes, I'm assuming that this is at least based on the common level of 5%. You can have a small sample size that is highly statistically significant if the skew is large enough. Unfortunately, even on slashdot, most people don't understand statistics.
That said, hypothesis testing just determines the probability that the results are NOT due to chance. Thus, it's totally possible that the results are due to something different that what the researchers propose - maybe they were just friendlier when asking from the right side.
Parent
Re:Not enough data (Score:4, Insightful)
Well! Get on the case boobs!
Parent
Re:Not enough data (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
indeed, the corpus callosum does connect the two hemispheres -- but remember, not everything in the brain is "active" -- much of it is passive, and it's not just "excitatory" -- it's also inhibitory. a lot of the signals on one side do not get routed to the other, to use a computer term.
at the same time, remember that the left-brain/right-brain stuff is pop psychology. one simple scientific finding, that language is primarily left-lateralized, got turned into this gigantic thing that just isn't true or in