Another older blog, saved, rinsed as tenderly as Kate Winslet's charcoal tits, and posted.
Today, we’re going to learn about how we hear things!
So, okay, lift your hands, fingers straight, palms facing each other. Put them on either side of your head.
Feel those things there? Those are your ears. Ooooooh.
NO. DON’T TEAR THEM OFF.
…Man, are you going to regret that later.
The outside of your ears (the pinna, lobe, tragus and rest of those bits. Each bump and dip has a name, it's exhausting.) are like satellites. They take in sound from all around you. You may notice from the tilt and angle of your ears that they’re geared to intercept head-on sounds better than to either side or, god-forbid, behind you.
Okay, so, first we have to back up a little, because, see, sound- as it exists in the air around us- is not sound. It is vibrations.
Picture a row of balls on strings.
Can I TELL you how nervous I was image-searching for “row of balls”?
Punch the first ball.
Close enough.
It waves back and forth, right? Well, it also hits the ball next to it, and THAT moves back and forth which hits the NEXT ball and so on. That’s what’s happening in the air. Vibrations. Everywhere.
So, our ears take in those vibrations. They grab them out of the air and focus them inwards. The vibrations travel through our ear canals (the part of the ear where you stick your ear phones, where bugs crawl and waxy yellow stuff called cerumen builds up. Whee!
Enjoy those nightmares.
So, those canals, they go into your head, right? Well, they get to your ear drum. Remember the glass of water in Jurassic Park? it vibrated with the footsteps of the dinosaur? Same basic thing. Vibrations shake your eardrums and move it around.
OMG DINOSAUR COMING
Now it’s transferred from vibration energy into mechanical energy because on the other side of your ear drum are three bones, the ossicles.
It gets a little Rube Goldberg around here.
On the other side of your eardrum, attached to it, actually, is a tiny bone called the hammer. When the ear drum shakes, it moves the hammer.
Little FallOut lookin’ guy, you get out of there this instant.
The hammer is attached to the anvil (makes sense, right?) and moves that.
…um, right.
The anvil is attached to a bone called the stapes (or stirrup) and moves THAT.
Hygiene is important, kids.
See what I’m getting at here?
Then, basically, the stapes convert that mechanical energy (the moving things) into chemical energy because sound moves from your middle to your inner ear, and your inner ear is full of fluid. They effect the inner ear where vibrations in liquid are sent through the cochlea (which is like a snail shell the size of a pee about an inch inwards. Sound travels through this spiral.
If you don’t understand this incredibly obscure reference, I am sad for you.
Now things get kind of puzzle-y. That spiral, your cochlea, is full of little ‘hairs’, they aren’t hairs, but that’s the easiest way to picture them. Each hair is geared to accept a certain frequency of vibration, so when ’sound’ gets in there, it’s like it splits up and each frequency finds its appropriate hair.
Little known fact: sound turns into animals inside of your ear.
So, when the hair is activated by being smacked upside with its appropriate vibration, it sends a message to your brain. Your brain gets all the messages from all the activated hairs and pieces them back together, interpreting them as sound.
Like, brain morse code.
So, basically, you get vibrations, turn them into a little machinery action into chemical action into physiological interpretation.
But, it’s kind of like Shakespeare. I think everyone in high school asks ‘Why can’t he just talk normal? Why does he have to talk like this?’
Ah, Shakespeare. No wonder he wrote like that, with such severe hydrocephalus.
Sound is like that. Why can’t we just hear sound as sound?
See, it’s a funny picture because it’s from Hamlet 2 and I was just talking about Shakespeare and Coogan is all ‘Well, what can ya do? *ker-SHRUG*’ and-… oh, nevermind.
Because, like Shakespeare, we’re just too cool for that.
Protip: the more educational the blog, the less logical and more numerous your pictures need to be.