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So basically for a person who has closed eyes and their head locked in place and the speakers are perfectly set it does depend on soundwaves being detected by different parts of their body... >>
Heheh don't know if this is a misspelling or what... but if you meant deflected, you're right. This stuff is really cool. Each person has his/her specific head related transfer function (HRTF) that tells him/her where the sound is coming from. Like, due to the shape of your head and outer ears, you might have a phase shift in the frequencies between 1000Hz and 1500Hz, for sounds that come from directly behind your head. If you heard such a sound from headphones, you couldn't tell me what the hell I did to it, but you'd tell me that it seemed like it came from behind you. Each person has different HRTFs (although I think that there are major 'groupings' of HRTFs, like fingerprints, so there's a lot of people who are 'similar' to you but not exactly like you), so if I played that same sound to someone else, they would just tell me that it sounded screwed up. That's why it took a long time for them to develop pseudo-surround headphones, and why even now they kind of suck for a lot of people.
It's kinda like if you see a baseball hit into the air, within 3 seconds you can tell me where it's going to land with pretty good precision (barring wind and stuff like that), but if I asked you the velocity of the ball, or to do the calculations even GIVEN the velocity and angle of the initial hit, you'd have no damn clue. All this stuff that our brain just *does* without us knowing it... it's really cool stuff
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