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The eardrums move when the eyes move

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Re: The eardrums move when the eyes move

#2
Is this something a person would be able to perceive?

I am moving my eyeballs around and imagining I can also feel my ears move, but that might just be the muscles around my ears in my head, or I'm completely imagining the effect.

Re: The eardrums move when the eyes move

#3
post #2

Is this something a person would be able to perceive? I am moving my eyeballs around and imagining I can also feel my ears move, but that might just be the muscles around my ears in my head, or I'm completely imagining the effect.

My guess is that the data gets sent to the brain but sometime during development the brain learned to ignore it (if it's not useful).

I think that when people talk about the "doors of perception" being opened by psychedelic drugs, often leading to experiences of synesthesia (seeing sound, etc), that it's this kind of sensory data that's made available to the brain once again, or that the brain is made unable to ignore it.

Re: The eardrums move when the eyes move

#5
post #2

Is this something a person would be able to perceive? I am moving my eyeballs around and imagining I can also feel my ears move, but that might just be the muscles around my ears in my head, or I'm completely imagining the effect.

The paper says this:

"Movements or tensioning of either the middle ear muscles or the outer hair cells modifies eardrum motion..."

So at least this study says the eardrums "move" in response to muscle change elsewhere. To detect the eardrum moving required a microphone placed inside the ear.

It seems this is not a human noticeable thing. Which makes sense; I'd imagine if it was, we'd have know this already. Most cases of such obvious ability to us are well known, at least.

Re: The eardrums move when the eyes move

#8
post #2

Is this something a person would be able to perceive? I am moving my eyeballs around and imagining I can also feel my ears move, but that might just be the muscles around my ears in my head, or I'm completely imagining the effect.

My guess is that the data gets sent to the brain but sometime during development the brain learned to ignore it (if it's not useful). I think that when people talk about the "doors of perception" being opened by psychedelic drugs, often leading to experiences of synesthesia (seeing sound, etc), that it's this kind of sensory data that's made available to the brain once again, or that the brain is made unable to ignor…

Sounds plausible. We do understand that the brain is incredibly good as filtering out massive amounts of regular data. Until it doesn't and you are suddenly aware of where your tongue is in your mouth and it keeps you awake for an hour.

Re: The eardrums move when the eyes move

#9
There is a medical condition where people can hear their own eye movements.

> The bizarre phenomenon of being able to hear the sound of the eyeballs moving in their sockets (e.g. when reading in a quiet room) "like sandpaper on wood" is one of the more distinctive features of this condition and is almost exclusively associated with SCDS.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_canal_dehiscence_sy...

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