Jim Hudspeth : The beautiful, mysterious science of how you hear

Jim Hudspeth·TED@NAS
The beautiful, mysterious of how you hear
Summary
We can’t see in the middle ear of ourselves. Even if you can see others’, it would be too small but too dark to see.

However, in the talk, the speaker will bring you into the middle ear. It means that you must feel being in the middle of an organ about the size of a chickpea that is the organ of hearing that is the coiled, snail-shaped cochlea that we learn in the school. I knew that there were hair cells in it from a previous talk and l thought that hair cells and our hairs must be the same, though, it was wrong.

Those cells (the whole set of hair cells, as a group) seem to report to the brain exactly what frequencies are present in a given sound. That time, your brain can determine what melody is being heard or what speech is being intended.

What we can hear is a very small sound like a pin drop which means that our ear system is turned up. The emitting sounds happen in a really quiet room and it shows how active the hair cell can be. However, in a very loud environment like a sporting event or a musical concert, we don’t need any amplification and the system is turned down all the way.

And then, unfortunately, when human hair cells die, they’re not replaced by cell division, though, we hear big sounds always, we are in a noisy environment always, our hearing is deteriorating. 1)
We don’t know what the molecular motor that is responsible for the hair cells are well 2) and how the hair cell’s amplification is adjusted to deal with the acoustic circumstances also. 3)

The speaker and his team are now engaged in research trying to solve those issues and to resurrect those amazing hair cells.

Words in this story
resurrect /verb/ restore (a dead person) to life.
deteriorate /verb/ become progressively worse.
amplification /noun/ expansion
frequency /noun/ he rate at which something occurs or is repeated over a particular period of time or in a given sample.