Capsan Uniport Chapter

How do our ears work?

This was a question that fascinated Nobel Prize laureate Georg von Békésy. He painstakingly dissected the structures that make up our inner ears, studying them with the help of a microscope and sequences of photographs as well as by measuring variations in electrical charges in the receptors. His research shed new light on our understanding of how the cochlea, a spiral shaped structure that transforms vibrations into neural signals, worked.

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Picture: Colour-enhanced scanning electron micrograph of the inside of a guinea pig inner ear showing the hearing organ, or cochlea. Running along the spiral structure are rows of sensory cells which respond to different frequencies of sound. The whole organ is just a few millimeters long. Credit: Dr David Furness