Lovers take heed. If you are going to whisper sweet nothings to your sweetheart, make sure it is through the left ear. So says Teow-Chong Sim of Sam Houston State University in the United States, who found in a study that emotional words got through to people better when spoken through the left ear, not the right.
"The findings are consistent with the role of the brain`s right hemisphere in the processing of emotional stimuli," Teow-Chong said in a statement at the British Psychological Society`s European Congress. The left ear is controlled by the right side of the brain.
The research involved speaking sets of emotional and non-emotional words to 62 people through each ear. When asked to recall the list of words they had heard, there was a 64 percent recall rate when emotional words were heard in the left ear compared with 58 percent in the right.
Scientists have also found a left-ear advantage for stimuli including musical chords and melodies. Bureau Report