Minichan

Hmmm... Sounds fun. Location by binaural hearing is a real thing. You can use the offset in frequencies observed by two points of collection to make a distance judgment. Bats do it all the time successfully. We can train computers to do it on submarines and shit. Apparently some humans can train them themselves to do it, but I'm a little skeptical. Check out wildlife articles about the frequency of cricket chirps - apparently the idea is that a higher frequency (the less distance between the peaks in the waveform) makes it hard for two sources (read: separate ears) to analyze accurately.

It's a fun idea, right? It's hard to draw an analogy to vision. We humans use two eyes to sight something, but we're not frequency matching across nanometers of light, but transforming it into representative neural signals by response to certain frequencies. (we couldn't, neural signals along the optic nerve don't move fast enough) I mean, we maybe could explore that with robots. (Actually, let's just not do that) Anyway, that's a really interesting question. Why do dogs need all that hearing?

Those fuckers are up to something. Why do they tilt their heads like that? Maybe they just want to roll over and be friendly...

Probably. Anyway. Treat any dogs you meet as good boys and girls until they prove otherwise. Maybe ask them why the fuck they need all that hearing. What are they doing, cathching gnats? Seriously? Do they have a dog language where they laugh at us and make fun of us behind our backs? No probably not.

Side note: I wonder if dogsciencemagazine.com would have an article about how humans see all these extra colors. Why do humans need to see extra colors that don't matter?

Author's note: Sorry Sheila, I had a bit of fun with it. I'm a little drunk. I really do think this is an interesting question to talk about. I would welcome a lively discussion about this topic to take my mind off... anything really.

(Edited 7 minutes later.)

yes it is a fascintating topic

@previous (Sheila LaBoof)
This is actually a crazy interesting topic. Sorry Sheila. Still drunk. I'm sort of going nuts.

We translate frequencies of pressure waves through the air from our ears in frequencies too high for the rate of neural response to mimic it. (I know what I said before. Comparing it to vision is a bit of a strawman. It's different in an important way. Bear with me.) But the neural input in the temporal lobes hits each ear individually and has to be compared across hemispheres. (Whereas dual visual input in most mammals has to be resolved before it hits V1 in the occipital lobe.)

So, actually this is a really awesome super fun thing to explore. This is information that has to be translated into neural signals and frequency matched across our brains in order to be explored. (not like other mammal vision, even though it's bat "vision") Human brains take a long time (200ms+) to do this when we call it hearing.

In fact, the length of your two "hearing bits" makes a huge difference, in mammals at least. (Picture the difference in milliseconds in response between you and an insect as you try to swat a cricket or a fly: It has a few neural connections that represent sensation as it senses a light change or sudden wind versus you (having millions) having to see it, register the fact (maybe a few million more) that it's a bug, move, make a bunch of air move, and try to swat it; The insect has to get a neural signal that hits a few neurons registering a threat and it's off. It's rigged. The bug wins. It way easier for the bug.)

The fact the bats have managed to eke out a sense of 3D space is fucking magic. The space between cricket or cockroach or housefly brains is tiny by comparison. It's a few million neurons at most, total in their brain matter. It is absolutely nuts that some mammals have carved out a space by trying to actually eat them by hearing them hard enough.

Bats are scary enough. I don't want to know that they can hear my heartbeat and shit. Anyway, bats are pretty amazing.

(Edited 4 minutes later.)

and then if you ever hear a sweep of audible frequencies, you notice that it sounds pretty high even on the low end of the scale, and quickly gets annoying, so much that you'd wonder why would we want to hear that high pitch shit, well it turns out the high frequencies are useful for locating sound sources's directions as was explained in the link in original post.

Yeah, cool. I have a couple friends whose dogs are getting old and going blind. They bark a lot more now to echolocate! Very cool.