EARWIGGLING

Can you wiggle your ears? I don't mean wriggling or waggling, but wiggling: moving the ears backwards and forwards. It involves operating the latent muscles of the ears. It has nothing to do with earwigs, though if one of those insects got into your inner ear and applied its forceps your ears might start waggling and wriggling.

Earwiggling is a skill that can be learned. One person recently asked publicly for help in wiggling one ear singly, not both together, a feat he is already able to perform.

In order to wiggle one ear at a time, more practice is needed in front of a mirror. That is where I learned the art (when I was a boy, ever fearful that the Devil would appear over my shoulder, as my mother threatened would happen to children who gazed at their own reflection too long). By grinning forcefully and widely the ears are made to move, and you can then concentrate on consciously finding the muscles that move the ears, and control them without the mouth grimace (and manipulate them without using your hands). You command the left ear to move alone, and then the right ear.

What use does this skill have? It impressed teenage girls, up to a point, and a by-product was the smoothing of wrinkles on my forehead, but this made me look too young to be taken seriously by them.

A heavily edited version of this appeared in NEW SCIENTIST (17 April 2010, No 2756, inside back cover); they deleted the reference to my mother, even though she was English; they struck out the Devil (as being an unscientific non-phenomenon, I suppose), and omitted the reason why I was not attractive to girls 60 years ago (I trust that situation will change, now I look older).