Don’t Shake Your Head To Get Water Out Of Your Ears, Scientists Warn

Water gets in our ears, whether from the pool or from the shower. If you’re one of those people who shake their head just to release the water trapped in your ears, it might be time to look for another solution. A new study suggests that there can be potential health risks that result from violently shaking your head. Researchers from Cornell University say that the forces involved in ejecting water from the ears can expose people, especially children, to brain damage. ScienceAlert has more details: 

"Our research mainly focuses on the acceleration required to get the water out of the ear canal," says engineering student Anuj Baskota, the first author of a paper being presented this week at the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics annual meeting in Seattle.

"The critical acceleration that we obtained experimentally on glass tubes and 3D-printed ear canals was around the range of 10 times the force of gravity for infant ear sizes, which could cause damage to the brain."

It's worth noting these are preliminary findings for now, based on experiments simulating the amount of force involved, and not involving real people (thankfully). So they can't be taken as clinical proof of brain damage incurred from this activity.

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