The Eyes Have It

Our eyes are more important when determining location that our ears. A study at Duke University verified this. The study concentrated on how the brain combines information from two different senses, in this instance, hearing and seeing. The experiment used 11 human test subjects and 2 monkeys, placed in a soundproof booth (probably not all together at the same time) and the experimenters used speakers in various locations with lights attached. Then they moved the sounds and lights around sometimes simultaneously and sometimes not and tracked the subject’s eye movements. The eye can take a snapshot and send the image to the brain but the ears don’t have anything that concrete to work with. And as with ventriloquists the eyes stay with the puppet’s moving mouth (rather than the ventriloquists mouth where the sound is actually coming from) leaving the power of vision to correct errors.

The experimenter at Duke University’s conclusion was that vision is much better at informing location. Must be why somebody invented flashlights!