Like I get that we obviously have ears on both sides of our head, but I would think that something that is directly ahead of us we should be unable to hear, since that object is basically perpendicular to our ears, but of course we can hear it absolutely fine. Why is that?
In: Biology
Because sound wraps around objects including your head. Light in the visual range doesn’t. There are energy levels or frequencies of light that can like radio but we can’t see those.
Ears are evolved to pick up sound from any direction. This is most helpful for survival.
Eyes are designed to pick up light from a very specific direction. This is helpful for things like hunting where this gives both depth and directionality. Also light has to be refracted in a particular way so that there can be a clear “vision”. This means our eyes have lenses that can change shape to see distant and close objects (you cannot read a book from 15 inches AND see a distant object at the same time and have both objects in focus) – therefore simultaneous multi direction vision is both more difficult (biologically) and not useful. This is unnecessary for ears.
Sound can bounce off objects and still carry the same message.
We see by having light enter our eyes. Unlike sound, light needs flat reflective surfaces to bound around.
If you were in a room surrounded by a mirror, you don’t need to be facing in a specific direction to see what’s happening behind you.
This is why our ears are such a weird shape, to collect sound and allow us to tell where it’s coming from. If we had no external ear, just a hole in the side of our heads, we would have much less capacity to tell which direction a sound is coming from and less capacity to hear sounds directly in front
Cupping your hands around your ears basically gives you “bigger ears” and you can increase your ability to hear a sound in a given direction by cupping your hands around your ears and turning in the direction
Visible light has to reach the back of our eyes for us to see it. The only way to do that is pass through our pupil.
Sound can pass through our ears (for the clearest sounds) or it can penetrate our skulls and still produce a much less clear sound. (Like, when you plug your ears and whisper you can still hear yourself distinctly but not as clearly.)
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