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by bonsai_spool
10 days ago
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Helpful reframing on this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/answers/comments/mo5sqi/do_any_anim... What do ears do? Transduce pressure vibrations into intelligible signals. If this is our understanding of an 'ear', we never really need more than two but instead need either binaural or non-binaural/decoupled. Beyond that, what does having more openings grant us that we're not getting with all the other pressure-sensitive organs we have? (namely all of our skin, some specialized tissues in other animals) |
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But binaural gives us a dramatically easier grasp of left-right localization. For a lot of things, that's all you need!
But the animal kingdom is large and diverse, and high-fidelity up-down-left-right localization would be similarly valuable in numerous places. It is a little bizarre to me that there's no freaky bat or something out there that evolved an extra molar into its own little secondary sonar sensor, with a centimeter of baseline from the normal set. Because with robotic sensors it wouldn't even be a question what to do.