Explain how the human ear works.
The following are the steps to how we hear: Sound transfers into the ear canal and causes the eardrum to move. The eardrum will vibrate with the different sounds. These sound vibrations make their way through the ossicles to the cochlea. Sound vibrations make the fluid in the cochlea travel like ocean waves. Movement of fluid in turn makes the hair cells, the auditory nerve, pick up any neural signals created by the hair cells. Hair cells at one end of the cochlea transfer low pitch sound information and hair cells at the opposite end transfer high pitch sound information. The auditory nerve moves signals to the brain where they are then translated into recognizable and meaningful sounds. It is the brain that “hears”.
