Two possible research subjects: one for neuroscience, one for social science

I recently finished a contract where I was working remotely with a company in Southern California. I live near Seattle. The main guy I had to talk with on the phone is a native German speaker with a thick accent, and as first I was having trouble understanding him:

For some reason I decided to try switching the phone from my right ear to my left:

After this I could understand what the guy was saying better, it seemed.

I'm not sure if I just got used to his speech patterns after a few minutes of conversation or if switching from right ear (left brain?) to left ear (right brain?) gave me an advantage in pattern matching, which surely comes into play when parsing a foreigner's speech over a phone connection.

Anybody know of research on this?

My second possible research subject: is there a possible inverse correlation between enjoyment of country music and mass transit usage/appreciation?

I am currently working for a company in Boston and have to travel there periodically for work. The recruiter I'm dealing with insisted on my first trip on "saving money" by putting me a $20 Uber ride from the end of the Red Line at Alewife, my closest point to the T in Boston that could take me to the downtown Boston office I needed to get to.

The first morning I was there the guy met me for breakfast at another hotel and then drove me into the work site. The first question he asked me was "do you like country and western music?"

My answer: "not really, but it's your car" ... he left the radio off and eventually we discussed the hotel site and traffic and it turned out he was apparently personally uncomfortable with expecting somebody from out of town figuring out the system and how to ride it where they want to go, and probably uncomfortable using it himself.

This doesn't make sense to me; I grew up in rural Louisiana and places with functioning mass transit seem like magic to me! The fact that I could stay in a hotel a few blocks from the Red Line and just walk over and get on for a ride downtown ... wahoo!

And I don't care for most country and western music ... so based on 2 (apparent) data points, that's a perfect 0 correlation between those two variables.

Social scientists: any existing literature on this?