Men are reported to have greater left hemispheric specialization (i.e., right-ear-advantage) for temporal domain processing than women as well (Brown et al., 1999). A sex-dependent asymmetry in mustached bat auditory cortex implies that this asymmetry is at least analogous to the asymmetries found in songbirds, rats, and humans. There are behavioral differences between male and female mustached bats relevant to how they process both biosonar signals and social calls: pulse-CFs 2 are higher in frequency amongst female bats (Suga et al., 1987), males emit social calls more often than females, and the sexes differ in the types of social calls they emit (Clement and Kanwal, 2012). The Medical Center includes the School of Medicine and the School of Nursing & Health Studies, both nationally ranked; Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, designated as a comprehensive cancer center by the National Cancer Institute; and the Biomedical Graduate Research Organization, which accounts for the majority of externally funded research at GUMC including a Clinical and Translational Science Award from the National Institutes of Health. ### 
 
 The study was supported by grants from the National Institute on Deafness and Communication Disorders and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD046388, DC75763, DC02054 and DC008822). "Bats need to use the fast timing of the left hemisphere to distinguish communication sounds from each other, because their communication sounds have rapid changes in frequency. Aside from humans, no other animal that has been studied, not even monkeys or apes, has proved to use such hemispheric specialization for sound processing -- meaning that the left brain is better at processing fast sounds, and the right processing slow ones.
– Humans were thought to be unique as a species in that we use both halves of our brains to "distinguish different aspects of sound," as Georgetown neuroscientist Stuart Washington puts it. Turns out we're not as special as we thought. A type of bat also displays this hemispheric specialization when it comes to sound processing, Washington has discovered. In both humans and Parnell's mustached bats—a species that lives in an area ranging from Mexico to Brazil, RedOrbit reports—the left hemisphere handles quicker sounds, while the right deals with slower ones, a press release reports. For humans, the right hemisphere "may allow us to identify who is speaking, to gauge their emotional state via tone of voice, and to tease out pitch in music," Washington notes. As for the left hemisphere, "men largely use just the left hemisphere" to process language, while women use both hemispheres to do so, Washington says. In mustached bats—named based on the hair springing from the sides of their snouts, Animal Diversity Web explains—the right hemisphere's slower processing is used for sonar, "which relies on detecting small changes in frequency," says Washington, senior author of the study in Frontiers in Neuroscience. The left is used "to distinguish communication sounds from each other, because (the bats') communication sounds have rapid changes in frequency." All this is more than just a matter of interest: The findings could help study human language disorders, especially since some study techniques "can only be permitted in animals," Washington adds. (Researchers are also learning more about how porpoises use sound—a lot like a flashlight.)