Audiory System Vs. The Central Auditory System

Although our ears may seem small and insignificant, they’re actually a vast network of channels and inner workings made out of two subsystems, the peripheral and central auditory systems to be exact. The way each works is pretty simple, with the peripheral having the outer, middle, and inner ear. The central system on the other hand has only two functions because it goes from the cochlear nucleus and works its way up to the primary auditory complex. Each section is shaped in such a precise way as to better help the next step which is what I’m going to try to explain without messing up too much. What the auditory system in full does is take a wide range of mechanical signals and turns them into a sequence of electrical impulses directly sent

When sound waves strike these folds they act as reflectors, sound is vacuumed into the ear canal, which is basically a sound amplifier, and processed by the brain. Another function of the Pinna is to correlate from which direction the sound originated from. When the sound waves finally impact the ear drum, which is located in the middle ear, the information from those waves goes to an air filled cavity by the three fragile Ossicle bones, also known as the hammer, anvil, and stirrup. What they do is take incoming sound vibrations which are striking the ear drum and transform it into a higher pitched vibration, and from there travel into what is known as the oval window. After moving through this window instead of air the waves are met by liquid which is why the frequency change was needed in the middle ear. The main instruments in the inner ear is the Cochlea which is shaped almost like a snail, this is where the sensory info is turned into neural messages. They do this by utilizing the Corti which has inner hair cells that take vibrations and transform them into electrical neural signals, the hairs supply nerves for the fibers which make up the auditory nerve in

Onto the subject of cochlear implants, now hearing aids are effective for most people with mild to moderate hearing loss because they replace the nerves in the cochlea which send electrical impulses through the hair nerves inside which are damaged or missing in this case. The sounds travel through the microphone then the amplifier and the speaker which allows the person to hear. Cochlear implants on the other hand help those who officially have sensorineural hearing loss and no longer benefit from the use of hearing aids as they did before. But that’s because what hearing aids do is amplify sound which sounds distorted, and sensorineural loss is a direct result of damage to the inner ear or the cochlea not the hearing nerve. These implants have two parts an internal and external component, the inner component is inserted during surgery and placed under the skin behind the ear, where a thin wire is then threaded through to the inner ear. The outer component looks very similar to the hearing aid that goes behind the ear and is connected to the inner component with a magnetic disk through the