25 Amazing and Interesting Facts about Ear | Amazing Facts 4U
- Our ear has 3 bones that are so small that they can be placed together on a penny. These three bones are called stapes, malleus, and incus. The stapes is the smallest of these three bones. These bones are also called hammer, anvil, and stirrup respectively.
- The middle ear is connected to the throat using a tube named the Eustachian tube. This tube is responsible for striking equilibrium between the body pressure and the atmospheric pressure.
- Ear infections are more common in children because of their developing immune systems and their Eustachian tubes being at a more horizontal angle than adults.
- The human ear is divided into three parts – the outer ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear. Each part has separate functions. The outer ear is the visible part of the ear and its function is to direct the sound further inside. The outer ear ends where the eardrum starts. The area after the eardrum is the middle ear which ends at what is known as oval window. This middle ear consists of the three tiny bones as above.
- The sound that enters the outer ear makes the eardrum vibrate. These vibrations are picked up by these three bones which actually form a bridge. The last bone is the stapes which transmits the vibrations to the oval window. The middle ear is the place where the sound gets amplified.
- The sound transmitted to the oval window moves into the inner ear which is actually a network of passages and tubes often referred to as ‘labyrinth’. This inner ear has a small snail shell-like organ known as cochlea where the sound is transformed into electrical impulses. These impulses are then sent to brain’s auditory center using auditory nerves and we can hear!
- In fact, in inner ear, the sound waves moves into a liquid medium. The tiny hair cells about 20,000 in number present in inner ear, react to the sound waves traveling through the liquid medium. This causes the hair cells to release chemicals that are carried by auditory nerves to the brain.
- The inner ear is located inside the temporal bone, one of the hardest bone in the human body for protection. The inner ear is no larger than a pencil eraser in circumference.
- Ears, like garbage cans, pick up all sounds and auditory symbols from the atmosphere and send them to the brain which is the higher center that makes sense of the useful sounds and neglects the rest.
- Your ears are more than just necessary for hearing. They also help you keep your balance.
- Sometimes if you have damage to your ears, your perception of taste may be affected because the nerve called the Chorda Tympani which run through the ear and connect the taste buds on the front of your tongue to your brain could be damaged.
- We might get strange feelings in ear or even go slightly deaf when we go high up on mountains because the Eustachian tube fails to maintain pressure resulting in dizziness, discomfort, ear pain etc.
- Amazingly human ear functions even when a person sleeps. The ears will continue to pick up sound but brain blocks them out.
- Human ears are self-cleaning organs. They produce what is known as ear wax medically called cerumen which is produced by tiny pores present in ear canal. There are tiny hairs in ear canal which are known as cilia. Cilia are responsible pushing the wax out. However too much wax impairs hearing abilities.
- Ear wax protects the ear from dust and friction. Aggressively cleaning ear wax may lead to deafness by damage to tympanic membrane.
- Amazing fact is that our ear drum is smaller than 0.7 inches in width and it moves less than a billionth of an inch while hearing to transmit sound.
- In ancient China it was believed that long earlobes signify long life while thick earlobes signify wealth. We long ears of Buddha and in images of ancient Chinese emperors. It is believed that Liu Bei, the founder of minor Han Dynasty in AD 221 had ears so long that they reached his shoulders and he was capable of seeing his own ears!
- Piercing earlobes and ornamenting them with jewellry has been common practice around the world for thousands of years for both for cultural and cosmetic reasons.
- It was widely believed among sailors that piercing one ear will improve their vision.
- Humans are capable of hearing sounds as low as 20 Hz. and as high as 20,000 Hz.
- The number one cause of hearing loss is exposure to excessively loud sounds (85 decibels or higher). Your hearing can be damaged permanently even after a single incident of exposure to extremely loud noise (shotgun blast, explosion, etc.).
- Sitting in front of the speakers at a rock concert can expose you to 120 decibels, which will begin to damage hearing in only 7 1/2 minutes.
- Not all living creatures hear with ears. Snakes use jawbones, fish respond to pressure changes, and male mosquitoes use antennae.
- Many animals here much better than us. In World War I parrots were kept on the Eiffel Tower in Paris. When the parrots heard enemy aircraft, they warned every one of the approaching danger long before any human ear would hear it.
- The strongest known ears belong to Manjit Singh. This man pulled a 7.5-ton passenger aircraft with his ears for a distance of 13 feet. He wore ear harnesses and ropes were attached to them. These ropes were in turn attached to aircraft.
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