Hearing

Your natural hearing system is one of nature’s greatest designs and miracles. Here’s what you need to know about how it works…


1. Your outer ear collects sounds coming in from the outside and funnels them into your ear canal towards the eardrum. 


2. Once the sound hits the eardrum it beats it like a drum (imagine that). 


3. On the other side of the eardrum is the malleus (otherwise known as “the hammer”), which causes a chain reaction with the incus (or “the anvil”) and the stapes (“the stirrup”). 


4. The stapes then lightly thumps the cochlea. 


5. The cochlea looks like a small snail, only without the hard shell. Inside of that cochlea are 30,000 fine hair-like nerve endings called cilia. These are like strings on a piano. The longer and thicker the nerve, the lower the tone that’s produced. The smaller and finer the nerve, the higher the tone that’s produced. 


6. The cochlea is filled with two types of fluid (perilymph & endolymph), once the stapes thumps the cochlea, a hydraulic effect is created and the fluid forces past all nerve endings causing them to bend over, which in turn produces a signal that goes to the brain, which interprets the signal as the sound you hear. 
A very, exact and perfect, but a very delicate system.

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