Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
Actually, humans are fairly typical animals with bad hearing. We don't go up into ultrasonic frequencies like dogs, let alone bats or dolphins, and we can't locate a mouse crawling under snow like owls. We live in a world of visible objects, not a world of noises like cats. Since GURPS is humanocentric (it says that humans have normal vision, not half a dozen levels of Acute Vision), that affect how things are rated.
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There's hearing
range (ultrasonic/infrasonic), and then there's hearing acuity ("what was that?") We're talking generic penalties here, not "is it in your audible range?"; we're talking acuity.
Owls are not the standard for precision in location of a sound at
all - their asymmetric ears are unusual. They're like hawks and eagles for vision -
exceptional. Humans don't have mobile pinnae, but from what I understand the wrinkly ears on great apes is supposed to actually act a little like the owl's asymmetry - weak in comparison, of course. Owls
are the superstars.
Similarly, dolphins and bats are
exceptional for having sonar, primates aren't sub-par for not having it. Bringing it up is really a complete side issue.
Humans have a lot of brainpower associated with processing the sounds we hear (within more or less the range of human speech) - like the dedicated brainspace for processing human faces, the wetware for processing speech can (and is) re-purposed for other specialist recognition tasks. Recognizing individual species of birds by a brief sample of song, identifying the make and model of a car by a brief glimpse of the bumper and turn signal.