Totally Tubular!

How’s a snail-shaped bone help us to hear?

If you aren’t deaf, a host of ear bio-devices and 25,000 nerve wires are constantly making possible the firing of messages to the brain. Imagine if someone vaporized the snail-shaped hollow bone in each of your ears that is about the size of a pencil eraser. If this happened, you would never hear one single sound again, no matter how loud it is! Why?

Sound is weird, but how we hear sound is even weirder.

Sound to you is the pounding of air or water against your eardrums. If we strummed one guitar string, it would whack the air many times a second. Because air molecules are close to each other, the first air molecules hit by the guitar string would hit the molecules next to them amid those would hit the top ones next to them and so on. It’s a bit like hitting a line of billiard balls that are all lined up and touching each other. When you strike a line of air molecules, all the molecules in the line will move…until the ones closest to you strike your eardrum! You’re hearing air whacks!—or water whacks if someone is screaming at you underwater.

A high pitched sound might have 10,000 whacks a second! These whacks are transferred from the eardrum to a stretchy-balloon like part on the snail-shaped cochlea bone. The cochlea makes a water-wave which moves hairs in the middle of this snail-shaped bone. These waves let molecules enter too-small-to-see tubes in the middle channel of the cochlea. Finally, a message is sent to your brain from the tubes letting your brain know you’ve heard something!

You hear nicely, don’t you? You owe the ability to hear to little tubes that let molecules move in specific ways inside your ears. God knew just how to make all these pieces work together, wouldn’t you say?!

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@lucneesby, thank you for arranging these visual elements! | See original post