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A long time ago, I was told that as good as cats' hearing is in general, humans are better at determining the direction from which a sound came than cats are, and that humans are more gifted in this regard than pretty much anything else other than owls. (I'm not sure about bats.) Given the source of this news, I was inclined to believe it -- it came from someone whose business it is to know such things -- but nearly everyone else I've mentioned it to has doubted me. Enough so that I've wound up conceding that hey, just maybe, I mis-heard or misunderstood what I was told...

It's something I think about a lot as I watch Perrine, and the more I watch her (and other animals I come in contact with), the more personally-observed data I have that supports this claim. And I'm not just talking about sharp, echoey noises in environments with lots of reflective surfaces -- Hell, those'll fool anything. No, this even includes mouse sounds, human voices, and other cats. Animals will often hear things that I can't hear until I get much closer, but if we hear something at the same time I'm likely to get the direction first (and usually more accurately). If Perrine listens long enough, those swivelling sound-catchers atop her head (and her ability to get closer to the source of the sound) do help her a lot eventually, and she'll home in on the sound if it goes on long enough and she's close enough to it (such as a mouse under a mound of plastic bags at a distance of eighteen inches (about half a meter[2])), and admittedly even on the speed test I don't win every time, but most of the time and at most distances, I seem to have better direction resolution.

Yeah, I'm a musician, but I don't think my hearing is exceptional in that way (except maybe when a fibromyalgia flare includes hyperacuity, but that tends to be greater awareness of sound and more sounds being physically painful, not so much Super Hearing, though I've heard of fibromyalgia patients for whom it seems to go in that direction). And my sample size is small (one human, a handful of cats, and three dogs), so I'm not describing a properly scientific test of the hypothesis. But the data I've observed so far are consistent with what I was told years ago that real scientific tests had already shown.

I'm not sure whether blind cats can place one-time sounds more accurately, are just faster at homing in on continuing sounds, or merely cope rather well with ordinary feline auditory processing. The last blind cat I had a chance to observe[3], I didn't get to spend enough time with, and the one before that was before I'd heard this bit about directional hearing and started paying attention.

Cats are pretty amazing -- there's no question of that -- but I think this is another example of an area where humans tend to a) process data subconsciously and thus not realize how much they're doing (consider Feynman's casual experiment regarding olfaction), and b) sell themselves short because of the meme that says humankind's strength is all in intelligence, tool-using, and being generalists, so we "can't possibly be That Good at any one thing" compared to the other animals. Actually, while we may not be best at these things, we're pretty damned high on the list when it comes to vision, hearing, endurance, and flexibility of diet, and some individuals are not too shabby in terms of strength and speed. I'm not sure how we stack up against other animals on olfaction; the only olfactory comparisons with which I'm familiar are to dogs, cats, and sharks.

[1] Don't answer that; I'm being silly.

[2] For my metric friends, I figure most of y'all know this but I'm uncomfortable not saying it anyhow: no, it's actually a little less than half a meter, but "eighteen" when followed by "inches" should usually be treated as a one-significant-digit base-thirty-six number, not a two-significant-digit base-ten number, so "half a meter" and "half a yard" are close enough to be within the error implied by the phrasing of the measurement. So there. I really meant "fifteen to twenty inches" anyhow.

[3] I may have forgotten other blind cats, but the second of the two I remember lived in my neighbourhood three houses ago, and the way I realized it was blind was that it had to spiral in towards me to find me when I tried to introduce myself. This suggests that that individual was not better at pinpointing sounds than sighted cats. The first blind cat, on the other hand (whom two people on my friends list knew far better than I), was notoriously good at "swat" with humans, and at normal play and status-defending behaviour with other (sighted) cats, which could be explained either by being better at determining directions of sounds in general, or by proximity to the sounds in those particular activities (and possible air-current detection using fur and whiskers).