> Hearing: an overview
Drawings and animations: S. Blatrix; editing: S. Irving
Hearing is a sense that plays a primordial role in relations between living beings and their environment. All of the world’s animals use hearing for a variety of behaviours: defence, feeding, sexuality… In human beings, the role of hearing is even more important: with the development of vocal language, hearing has become the main means of social interaction and communication.
Hearing is the result of the collaboration between the ear and the auditory brain. An ear without a brain is like an unplugged microphone, but without ears we wouldn’t even be able to imagine what a sound was like!
Diagrams of the sensory organ/brain association |
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Six sensory organs receive stimulation from the environment (so let’s stop talking about our ‘five senses’!). They are situated in the eyes (light/vision), nose (odours/smell), mouth (flavours/taste) and all over the surface of our skin (touch, hot-cold, pain/general sensitivity). The last two are found in the inner ear: the cochlea (sounds/hearing) and the vestibule (motion and head position/balance). Click on thumbnails below to see two examples for the viual and auditory sensations. |
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Sound is captured by the outer ear, amplified by the middle ear and transferred to the inner ear or cochlea, which transforms the sound vibration into a neural signal. The auditory nerve feeds this coded message (which contains all of the sound’s attributes: loud or soft, high or low, short or long, etc...) to the brain where different structures work together to create a percept: I can hear! |
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