Our ears reveal our feelings: A step toward machines with super-emotional intelligence?

The muscles of the human ear reveal what and how we feel. This is the finding of Dr. Farah Corona-Strauss and Sophie Bonnaire, researchers at the Systems Neuroscience & Neurotechnology Unit in Saarbrücken and Homburg. Their research shows that activity in our ear muscles indicates not only who we are listening to and how attentively, but also the intensity of our emotional response, all within a fraction of a second. The discovery could have important implications for the debate surrounding artificial intelligence, raising the question of what a machine should be permitted to do if it can recognize emotions more accurately than any human.