How your hearing works

Before we can even begin to discuss the causes of Tinnitus and how to get rid of it, you must first understand how your hearing works.

Your ears are extraordinary organs. They pick up all the sounds around you and then translate this information into a form your brain can understand. Although we use our sense of hearing all day, every day, most of us take it for granted until there is a problem.

 

Scientists are learning more and more about how the sounds that enter our ears are translated into information that we need to understand the world around us. The process by which sound is captured and funneled into our ears is simply mechanical.  Your sense of smell, taste and vision all involve chemical reactions, but your hearing system is based solely on physical movement.

As we will see, each part of the ear has a job to do in collecting and transporting sound to the brain.

  

How sound is made and carried:

To understand the function of the ears, we should take a moment to discuss how sound is created and how it travels. An object produces sound when it vibrates in matter. This could be a solid, such as earth; a liquid, such as water; or a gas, such as air. Most of the time, we hear sounds traveling through the air in our atmosphere.

When something vibrates in the atmosphere, it moves the air particles around it. Those air particles in turn move the air particles around them, carrying the pulse of the vibration through the air.

Anatomy of the Ear

The ear is made up of three parts: the outer, middle, and inner ear.  All three parts of the ear are important for detecting sound by working together to move sound from the outer part through the middle and into the inner part of the ear.  Ears also help to maintain balance.

 Outer ear:

Which are the visible protrusions of our ears. Some of us may have large ears, others small, but they all   serve the same function: to collect the sounds around us and transport them to the inner ear where they are sent as signals to the brain.

 

 

 

The Middle Ear:

 

The middle ear includes:

1-eardrum

2-cavity (also called the tympanic cavity)

3-ossicles (3 tiny bones that are attached)

       A- malleus (or hammer) – long handle attached to the eardrum

        B-incus (or anvil) – the bridge bone between the malleus and the stapes

        C-Stapes (or stirrup) – the footplate; the smallest bone in the body

Sound entering the outer ear travels through the middle ear and causes the eardrum and ossicles in the middle ear to vibrate.  As it travels, it amplifies (becomes louder) and changes from air to liquid.

 

The Inner Ear:

 

The inner ear includes:

1-oval window – connects the middle ear with the inner ear.

2-semicircular ducts – filled with fluid; attached to cochlea and nerves; send information on balance and head position to the brain.

3-cochlea – spiral-shaped organ of hearing; transforms sound into signals that get sent to the brain.

4-auditory tube – drains fluid from the middle ear into the throat behind the nose.

Up to this point, all sound has been traveling through air. But at the inner ear, sound will encounter fluid for the first time and the way in which it travels to the brain changes dramatically.  The cochlea takes the fluid vibration of sounds from the surrounding semicircular ducts and translates them into signals that are sent to the brain by nerves like the vestibular nerve and cochlear nerve.

So:

Scientists are still working on a thorough understanding of just how the brain is able to interpret these electrical pulses into language, music, or just plain noise. The ear is a complicated and sophisticated system, which takes an external stimulus and uses mechanical energy to transfer that information to the brain.

Source :

http://www.earq.com/hearing-loss/ear-anatomy

http://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/hearing.htm