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You’re in a loud and sweaty Italian dance club when a woman approaches you. To be heard over the techno, she leans in close and yells into your ear, “Hai una sigaretta?”
If she spoke into your right ear, you would be twice as likely to give her a cigarette than if she asked by your left ear, according to a new study that employed this methodology in the clubs of Pescara, Italy. Of 88 clubbers who were approached on the right, 34 let the researcher bum a smoke, compared with 17 of 88 whom she approached on the left.
“The present work is one of the few studies demonstrating the natural expression of hemispheric asymmetries, showing their effect in everyday human behavior,” write psychologists Daniele Marzoli and Luca Tommasi of the University G. d’Annunzio in Italy.
It’s the latest in a series of studies that show that sound from both human ears is processed differently within the brain. Researchers have noted that humans tend to have a preference for listening to verbal input with their right ears and that given stimulus in both ears, they’ll privilege the syllables that went into the right ear. Brain scientists hypothesize that the right ear auditory stream receives precedence in the left hemisphere of the brain, where the bulk of linguistic processing is carried out.
What’s surprising about the study is that ear choice had such a decided impact on the behavior of participants in a natural, or as the researchers put it, ecological, setting. Why would people feel more generous when their right ears are addressed?
Marzoli and Tommasi write that some work has shown that the left and right hemispheres of the brain appear to be tuned for positive and negative emotions, respectively. Talk into the right ear and you send your words into a slightly more amenable part of the brain.
“These results seem to be consistent with the hypothesized differential specialization of right and left hemispheres,” they write.
In addition to the direct cigarette-ask study, they also simply observed people interacting and also asked for cigarettes without directing their requests towards a particular ear. The Italian researchers picked the night club setting because the loud music allowed the cigarette-asker to approach people and speak directly into one ear without seeming “odd.”
While the liquored-up setting might seem unconventional, they view their work in a real life setting as a valuable counterbalance to highly artificial in-lab psychological studies.
“[W]e would finally like to add that it is of utmost importance, in times of massive use of imaging techniques (that by definition impose severe constraints on the observation of neural activities in freely acting subjects) to continue to provide ecological evidence of brain functioning,” they conclude.
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设想你身处在一个嘈杂的，人人都大汗淋漓的舞厅里，一名女士向你走了过来。你想要从震耳欲聋的电子摇滚乐中听到她的话，只见她凑过身对你大喊：“Hai una sigaretta?（能给我根烟吗?）”
研究人员在意大利佩斯卡拉（Pescara）的俱乐部采用这样的方法调查后得出了结论：如果她朝你的右耳喊，那么你给她香烟的几率将会是她朝你左耳喊的几率的两倍。在88个朝右耳喊的人中，有34个给研究人员递了根烟；而在88个朝左耳喊的人中，只有17个这么做。
“现在我们所做的工作，是解释大脑半球对称性的自然表达，说明他们对人类日常生活的影响，而这个研究领域很少有涉及。”意大利G. d’Annunzio大学的心理学家丹尼尔·马泽里（Daniele Marzoli）和卢卡·托马西（Luca Tommasi）如是写道。
最新的一系列研究表明，从人类的左右耳传入的声音在大脑中是得到不同处理的。研究人员注意到，人类往往喜欢用右耳进行语言输入，并且如果给予双耳同等的刺激，右耳所听到的音节在大脑中往往占优势。脑科学家继而提出假设：右耳的听觉系统优先进入左半脑，而左半脑是大量语言处理进行的地方。
这个研究中令人感到惊奇的是，在一个自然的，或者用研究者的话来说，“纯生态"的环境中，耳朵的选择竟对个体的行为有如此决定性的影响。当别人对你的右耳讲话时，你究竟是为什么会感到更加从容呢？
马泽里和托马西写道，一些研究表明，大脑的左右半脑似乎是各自处理积极的抑或是消极的情绪，好比某种情绪是对它的胃口一般。别人朝你的右耳讲话，你就会把所听到的内容传到一个更“对味”的半脑中。
“这些研究结果似乎和左右半脑专长功能差别的假设不谋而合。”他们写道。
除了直接的以问别人要烟的方式研究，他们也单纯观察人们的互动行为，比方说问别人要根烟，但不向特定某个耳朵说话。这两名意大利研究人员先前挑选了夜总会的环境，是因为吵闹的音乐声能够让要烟的人接近对方，直接对某一只耳朵说话，而不会让对方感到奇怪。
虽然那个充满烟酒气的环境可能让研究看上去不是很常规，研究者却把这个现实生活的研究环境，看作是比高度人工的实验室心理研究还有价值的替代方式。
”我们最后想说，在一个大量使用图像技术的时代，继续使用在"纯生态"环境下所得到的有关大脑功能的证据，是至关重要的。（这里的图像技术，即在研究对象上施加严格的约束，以观察神经活动的大脑功能的研究方式。）”他们如是总结道。
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