The Ears Facts
The Ears Facts
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| Interesting The Ears Facts: |
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| The inner ear, which processes sounds, also helps with balance. It is located in the temporal bone, which is the hardest bone in the body and is part of your skull. |
| Tiny hair cells in your inner ear are what translates sound waves to electricity to send to the brain. You're born with about 3500 of these cells, and they can be damaged by really loud noises. Make sure to wear ear plugs if you'll be around loud noises! |
| The middle ear contains the three tiniest and most fragile bones in your body. These transmit sound from the ear drum to the inner ear. They are named for the way they look - the malleus, incus, and stapes. Malleus means hammer in latin, incus means anvil in latin, and stapes means stirrup in latin. Of these, the stapes is the smallest, making it the smallest bone in your body. |
| Have you ever popped your ears? When you go up or down a very large hill or mountain, the pressure of the air changes. This puts pressure on your middle ear, which causes the popping sound. This occurs through tiny tubes (Eustachian tubes) that go from your middle ear to the back of your nose, which help to make the pressures the same. These can get blocked when you have a cold, making going up and down large hills painful. |
| Why do you sometimes feel a little sick or dizzy after getting off a ride like the Tilt-A-Whirl? Special loops in your inner ear, called semicircular canals, help with your balance. These canals are filled with fluid, which moves with your head, and move tiny hairs inside the canals, which tells your brain which way your head is moving. When you are spinning (like in the Tilt-A-Whirl) this liquid gets to spinning too. When the ride is over, the liquid is still spinning, but your eyes tell your brain you are not moving. Since your brain is getting two different messages, it gets confused, and you get dizzy as a result. |
| Don't poke around in your ears! Even though you may want to clean out that ear wax (which helps by protecting the ear from infections, and cleaning out dirt), if you push too far in with an object you can damage the ear drum. |