Marshall Brain's Blog

Here is the random question for today:

Does the ear that you use when you are talking on the phone affect the way that you process what you are hearing?

If you read anything about the differences between the left and right sides of the brain, you know that they process information very differently. One side is more analytical, the other is more intuitive. In people who have had their corpus callosum surgically severed (usually people suffering from severe epileptic seizures), the differences between the two sides can be seen more clearly. (read more here)

Most of us have both halves of the brain connected normally through the corpus callosum , but when you talk on the phone, one side of the brain gets the message first, and so, you could imagine, it gets the "first crack" as processing the information. It may also get to interpret or compress the information before passing it to the other side (I don't know enough about the corpus callosum to know what happens).

Talking on the phone, and hearing audio information through one ear, is definitely not how we would normally hear things "in nature", so the question arises -- do you process the information differently when you talk on the phone with your left or right ears? Which ear is better? Is one ear better for business meetings and another for emotional situations?