Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The muscles that enable modern humans to wiggle their ears likely had a more important job in our evolutionary ancestors. . | ...

Learn more about the auricular muscles, which activate when we wiggle our ears, and apparently, when we listen to several sounds at once. They wiggle, though they don’t do much else. That’s what we’ve ...

Vestigial human ear muscles react to sounds even if the external ear does not move. This could be used to build better earing aids. If you hear something interesting, you might prick up your ears.

If you can wiggle your ears, you can use muscles that helped our distant ancestors listen closely. These auricular muscles helped change the shape of the pinna, or the shell of the ear, funneling ...

Most people never think twice about their ears, until they catch a strange little twitch they can't explain. It might happen after a sudden noise or while trying to focus on a distant sound. These ...

In almost every species, ear movement can be a clue that the animal is trying to pay close attention to something. When people are trying hard to listen to something, the body seems to do its best to ...

Scientists have discovered that vestigial ear muscles – remnants from our distant evolutionary past – become surprisingly active when humans strain to listen in challenging environments. This finding ...

If you hear something interesting, you might prick up your ears. That's a figurative expression, of course. People's ears don't actually move upward. But NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce found that this old ...