10 things you didn’t know about hearing
We don’t often think about those two funny shaped things poking from the side of our heads but they are responsible for one of our most precious senses: hearing. Hearing allows you to communicate, experience and enjoy the world and the people around you. So in honour of our ears here are 10 fun hearing facts.
1. The bones in the middle ear are your body’s smallest bones. All three – the incus, the malleus, and the stapes can – can fit together on the surface area of a coin.
2. Your sense of hearing is dependent upon tiny hairs deep inside your ear. If you lose these hairs, you lose your hearing.
3. The outer ear never stops growing throughout one’s lifetime.
4. Your ears convert sound waves into nerve impulses that are sent to the brain to make sense of all the noise.
5. You do not need to clean wax out of your ears unless you have an abnormal condition. Ears push excess wax out as needed.
6. Not all living creatures hear with ears. Snakes use jawbones, cicadas use their stomach, crickets have hearing organs on their knees and fish don’t even have ears. They hear pressure changes through ridges on their bodies.
7. Your hearing can be damaged permanently even after a single incident of exposure to extremely loud noise such as a gun blast or explosion.
8. Your ears never stop hearing, even when you sleep. Your brain just ignores incoming sounds.
9. The ear has over 25,000 tiny hair cells to help you hear the nuances of sound.
10. Sound travels 4.3 times faster in water than it does in air.