Personality tests: are they baloney?

I've been thinking recently about personality tests (specifically the MBTI): the one I consistently test as is INFP, (wiki) (maybe I should quit science and become a social worker...). Reading the descriptions of that type, I have to admit that it sounds awfully familiar. When I read the description of the exact opposite type: ESTJ, it was pretty clear that I'm not anything like that. One letter switches from INFP tend to look fairly familiar to me also. So there certainly seems to be some validity to personality tests (this has also been shown in the scientific literature), they measure something, even if it's not always clear exactly what. However, I think people need to be very careful with interpretation and application of the results of personality tests, and not take them too seriously. You are precisely who you are, and not precisely who some silly test says you are!

Head hair as a sensory organ

It's no mystery that hair acts to amplify the sense of touch. Everyone is familiar with the feeling of a bug crawling on their arm, and everyone who has ever gone swimming with a beard knows how much more pleasurable (like a million tiny hands gently pulling at your chin) it is than swimming without a beard. There are also more mystical ideas about long hair granting a kind of sixth sense.

I recently gave myself a buzz cut after letting my hair grow for about 2 years. My hair is moderately curly, so when it's long it poofs out an inch or two from my scalp. From my experience, I don't think long hair grants any kind of mysterious powers (nor do I think it has any effect on personality or intelligence, although people with certain personality traits may be more likely to choose to grow their hair long), but I was surprised to find that scalp hair does seem to contribute to spatial awareness. My evidence for this (which is admittedly circumstantial and has a low sample size, but this would be a very hard thing to test in a controlled environment, you can't very well have a "double blind" haircut) is that in the 24 hours after I cut my hair, I bonked my head into the wall twice. Once I was leaning over to put something in the trash can, and hit my head on the corner of the doorway that the can is next to. The other time I was in the shower and leaning around the too-hot stream of water to adjust the knobs. So I think scalp hair can function for people kind of like how whiskers function for cats.

I think that when I had poofy hair, I subconsciously used it to provide spatial information about the environment immediately around my head. Lacking that information, but not yet having had a chance to compensate by other means, my lack of hair temporarily increased my propensity to bonk into things.

Only listening to music in the right ear while working

I used to have a lot of trouble listening to music and doing homework or programming at the same time. It was distracting and I had trouble thinking while the music was going. Sometimes I'd have it on for tedious parts of a task and then when I got to a part that took a lot of careful thinking, I'd turn it down until I got to another boring part. I probably wasted a lot of time just flipping the music on and off. I also noticed that music with words was much more distracting than music without words, so sometimes I'd just listen to light orchestral music instead of the rock and folk I usually listen to.

In any case, what I noticed eventually is that if I listen to music through a headphone on my right ear only, I find it easier to tune out, and less distracting than when I use both ears, or just my left ear. In fact, I find having music in only the left ear to be rather obnoxious.

Why the right ear? It's hard to know, and with a sample size of one, and an investigation that is hardly double blind (or even single blind), it's not at all likely that I'll ever figure it out for sure. But it strikes me as an interesting phenomenon and there's no harm in speculating so here are some ideas:

It could be that the particular ear is not relevant, and the reason I favor one ear over the other is random. I don't remember quite when this habit started (sometime in the last 3 years I think), or why I originally chose to use only my right ear and not the left. It's possible that it was random, that I thought the music was too loud or distracting so I took one headphone off and it seemed better, so the next time I took the same one off even though it wouldn't have made a difference. However, I vaguely remember that even at the beginning the reason I chose the right ear is that the music was only unpleasant in my left ear, hence there was negative feedback encouraging me to remove the headphone from my left ear, but not from the right.

It may be that my right ear just happens to be slightly less sensitive than my right ear. This isn't at all obvious in everyday life, but perhaps there is some 5% or 20% difference in sensitivity peculiar to me.

My favorite, hypothesis, however is that it has something to do with the division of labor in the brain (and hopefully I don't fall victim to too many pop-neuroscience misconceptions here). I'm right handed, so when I type, use the mouse, or write or draw, as I would while working, my left hemisphere has to work harder than my right hemisphere. The left hemisphere contains the center for language, and it was the words in songs that I found most distracting, so maybe the one level of indirection is enough to prevent the music from unduly interfering with my internal dialog. Stretching a bit more, a lot of what I do is highly analytical (like computer programming, or math and science homework), so if the left brain is the center of logic then I may be relying on it more than on the right brain (when doing so called right-brain centric activities, especially drawing, but also writing poetry, I often listen to music from speakers or with both headphones, so there may be some connection there too).

Google turns up a few other reports of things like this on this, but it's all anecdotal (although I haven't yet tried to search the scientific literature, maybe there is something there, not sure how much of it I'd understand though).

What about you, oh vast teeming readership, do you think this is a real phenomenon? Or is it just stochastic noise (pun intended!) and confirmation bias?