New model explains how we hear directly with our skull b4in.org/s5G0 Most people would be surprised to find out that you don’t only hear with your ears – you can also hear directly with your skull. Our skull bone can pick up and conduct sounds to an extent and a new model developed by German and British researchers has shown why and how we actually perceive sounds with our skull. Our sense of hearing is a very complex system, but at the core of it lies the inner ear. When sounds travel from the outside ear and eventually reach the inner ear they cause different regions of the basilar membrane in the inner ear to vibrate. However, the bone surrounding the inner ear can also vibrate, and transmit information.Tatjana Tchumatchenko from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt and Tobias Reichenbach from Imperial College London have developed a new model which shows that the vibrations of the bone and basilar membrane are coupled. In other words, they can also mutually excite each other. This is where it gets more complicated. Which regions of the membrane they vibrate depends on their frequency, but what if the bone vibrates too, won’t that interfere with the signal? Also, what happens if two sounds with different frequencies arrive at the same time? Won’t they overlap and cause chaos? This model clears things out. “Our results provide an elegant explanation for this long-known but poorly understood observation,” says Tobias Reichenbach from Imperial College London. More b4in.org/s5G0
Posted on: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 18:28:50 +0000
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