Most people who wiggle their ears do so for the novelty of it, but ear wiggling apparently can be a medical problem as well as a source of amusement. In November’s American Journal of Psychiatry, Dr. Matcheri Keshavan reports on 10 case histories in which ear wiggling had become an involuntary tic for patients. Some patients were annoyed that their ears kept wiggling and tried to make them stop, unsuccessfully.
These patients sometimes developed headaches from their efforts, Keshavan noted. Others ignored the ear wiggling. In some cases the phenomenon appeared to be linked to stressful events such as an unhappy marriage or death of a spouse, but in other cases the cause was unclear.
One boy who started wiggling his ears to mock his classmates eventually found the ears went on wiggling whether he wanted them to or not, Keshavan wrote. “Another patient, during a psychotherapy session, interpreted the upward movement of his ears as symbolic of his striving for upward social mobility,” Keshavan wrote. “Psychoanalytic interpretations, however, shed little light on why the life problems of most of our patients were brought to medical attention by these unobtrusive organs.”
