Why You Hear Better With Your Right Ear

We all have five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. Each one of them helps you navigate the world by letting your brain know what is going on around you. When they work together in harmony, they keep you safe from danger and allow you to focus on what is important to you. Your senses work hard, even when you’re asleep. Sound, for example, can disrupt sleep, waking you from your slumber to warn you if something unusual is occurring in the middle of the night - even if that’s just your dog wanting to play fetch at 2 a.m.

Your body truly is a miracle. Hearing alone is a very complicated process. The sense that allows you to perceive sound only works thanks to the complex system that is the human ear. Simply put, sound is funnelled through the external ear into the auditory canal. From there, sound waves reach the eardrum, a thin sheet of connective tissue that vibrates when sound waves strike it. The vibrations travel to the middle ear where they are passed on to the organ of Corti - a spiral organ that is the receptor organ for hearing. Functioning as a sort of translator, it turns vibrations into electrical impulses that travel to the brain via sensory nerves.

A Job For Different Sides Of The Brain

And here is the clue to why your right ear is better equipped to understand and make sense of noise: Sounds entering your right ear are processed by the left side of the brain, which controls speech, language development, and portions of memory. The sounds entering your left ear, on the other hand, are processed in the right hemisphere of your brain, which dominates over the right in processing different sounds such as pitch, timbre and loudness which plays a role for listening to or making music. This is why many folks will automatically turn their right ear towards you if they’re having trouble understanding you.

Young children’s auditory systems don’t have the same ability as adults to separate background noise from important information, and as a result, they rely on the ear with the most efficient pathway. We’ve assumed for a long time, that the right ear dominance diminishes over time. But a recent study has proven that this effect can be found both in kids and adults: "Conventional research shows that right-ear advantage diminishes around age 13, but our results indicate this is related to the demand of the task,” said Dr Aurora Weaver, a member of the research team. "As we age, we have better control of our attention to processing information as a result of maturation and our experience."

To understand the ear differences in adults and learn how to help people hear better, the researchers asked 41 participants between the ages 19-28 to complete complex listening tasks: wearing a headset they had to recall a list of numbers played into either their right or left earpiece. The researchers found no difference in hearing at the normal memory capacity. As the list of digits, the participants had to recall grew, results were an average of eight per cent better when the numbers were played into to the right-hand ear, with some individuals improving as much as 41 per cent!

The research team is hoping the findings of the study will help improve hearing aids and deafness testing: “The more we know about listening in demanding environments, and listening effort in general, the better diagnostic tools, auditory management, including hearing aids, and auditory training will become”, researcher Dr Danielle Sacchinelli added.

"We always assumed that our left and right ears worked exactly the same way. As a result, we tended to think it didn't matter which ear was impaired in a person. Now we see that it may have profound implications for the individual's speech and language development," said the leader of the study, Dr Yvonne Sininger of University of California at Los Angeles.

After our eyes, our ears are one of the most important sensory organs. Hearing loss can have far stretching impacts on your life and have a variety of causes, from progressing age to extremely loud noises and even infections. Protect your hearing and that of your children, to prevent these issues and make sure to get a hearing test should you suspect that you are already experiencing first signs of hearing loss.

The good news is: Modern technology makes life easier and can help you hear better - whether it’s your left or right ear that is affected! When amplifying and modulating background noises, hearing aids can take into account how your brain processes sound and voices.

Don’t hesitate - make an appointment with your audiologist today and improve your quality of life!