Comment by mapt
2 hours ago
They mention that the ears have gone non-bilateral to achieve better 3d sound localization.
It brings to mind the question of why nothing seems to have evolved two pairs of ears with separate openings; We're all working with varying degrees of spectrum shaping to achieve up-down sound localization. If you wanted to design a robot that can perform sound localization, the obvious answer for that extra dimension would be to just double up on the microphones.
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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