Why Most People Can't Wiggle Their Ears

Try to wiggle your ears right now. Go ahead, give it your best shot. If you're like most people, nothing happened—maybe a slight scalp tension, but your ears stayed firmly in place. You're in good company: only 10-22% of people can voluntarily move their ears.

The Muscles You Forgot You Had

Believe it or not, you have three muscles attached to each ear specifically designed for movement. The auricularis anterior pulls the ear forward, the auricularis superior lifts it up, and the auricularis posterior pulls it back. Together, they're called the auricular muscles, and in most humans, they're essentially decorative.

These muscles aren't broken—they're just disconnected from conscious control. The neural pathways that would let you command them have largely gone dormant in humans, vestiges of a time when our ancestors needed mobile ears.

Blame Evolution

Many mammals rely on ear movement for survival. Cats rotate their ears toward sounds. Horses flick them to communicate mood. Even our primate relatives use ear positioning to signal emotions and detect threats. For early humans and their ancestors, mobile ears were likely useful for the same reasons.

But as humans evolved, we developed other advantages:

• We can turn our heads quickly on flexible necks
• Our brains became better at processing sounds without directional ear movement
• Facial expressions and language replaced ear signaling for communication

The muscles remained, but natural selection stopped caring whether they worked.

Can You Learn to Wiggle?

Here's the encouraging news: ear wiggling can be learned. The muscles exist and they do function—they just need to be reconnected to your voluntary control. People who've mastered it often describe a similar learning process.

The trick is finding the right mental trigger. Many learners start by raising their eyebrows while trying to move their scalp backward, or by smiling widely while focusing on the area behind their ears. Once you feel even the slightest movement, you can isolate and strengthen that connection.

Some people learn in days; others practice for months. A few never get it at all, suggesting there may be genuine anatomical variation in how these muscles are wired.

The Genetics Question

Scientists have debated whether ear wiggling is inherited. Early studies suggested it might be a dominant genetic trait, meaning if one parent could wiggle, children likely could too. More recent research muddies the picture—plenty of wigglers have non-wiggling parents, and the ability seems to run in some families but not others.

The current thinking is that both genetics and practice matter. You may inherit muscles that are easier to control, but you still need to discover how to use them. Many people who "can't" wiggle their ears have simply never tried hard enough or found the right technique.

A Party Trick Millions of Years in the Making

So if you can wiggle your ears, congratulations—you've maintained a connection to neural pathways most humans have abandoned. You're performing a movement that helped your distant ancestors survive, repurposed now for amusing your friends.

And if you can't? Your ears work fine. Evolution just decided you didn't need the remote control.