The Ear and Hearing Loss
The ear is the organ of hearing and balance in vertebrates. The ear converts sound waves in the air, to nerve impulses which are sent to the brain, where the brain interprets them as sounds instead of vibrations. The innermost part of the ear maintains equilibrium or balance. The vestibular apparatus contains semicircular canals which in turn balance you. Any movement by the head, and this apparatus sends a signal to the brain so that your reflex action is to move your foot to balance you.
The ear in humans consist three parts: The outer, the middle, and the inner portions. The outer ear, or pinna, is the structure that we call the ear.
It is the skin covered flap of elastic cartilage, that sticks out from the side of the head. It acts like a funnel catching sound and sending it to the middle portion of the ear. The middle portion contains the ear drum and the connection between the pharynx and the drum, the Eustachian tube. The inner ear contains the sensory receptors for hearing which are enclosed in a fluid filled chamber called the cochlea. The outer and middle ears purposes are only to receive and amplify sound. Those parts ofd the ear are only present in amphibians and mammals, but the inner ear is present in all vertebrates.
The ear can hear in several different ways. They are volume, pitch, and tone. Pitch is related to the frequency of the sound wave. The volume depends on the amplitude or intensity of the sound wave. The greater the frequency, the higher the pitch. Humans can hear about 30 and 20,000 waves or cycles per second. High pitch sounds produce more of a trebly sound, while low pitch sounds produce a rumbling bass sound.
When a person loses these abilities to comprehend sound, it is referred to as deafness. It can be caused by disease, toxic drugs, trauma, or an inherited disorder. Those causes can be classified as conductive, sensorineural, or both.
A conductive hearing loss results from damage to those parts of the ear which transmit sound vibrations in the air to the fluids of the inner ear. This type of damage is usually to the eardrum or small bones known as ossicles.
Ossicles conduct sound from the eardrum to the cochlea. They cannot perform such an action if the eardrum is perforated, if the middle ear cavity is fill...
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...lly there may be a school in a hospital.
Hearing devices are also available. Hearing Aids operate on battery.
They amplify the sound waves that the ear would normally receive. They range from $500 to $6000.
INTERVIEW
Question: How did you become about this disability? Answer: I was born with a hearing disability
Q: When we talk, what exactly do you hear? A: The sound volume is lower but no distortion Q: Would you consider yourself hard on hearing? A: No, and I say no because I can hear when I pay attention but when I am not paying attention, it is like I am in my own world. Also, sometimes, I can see their lips moving which signals me to listen closely.
Q: Did you ever go for any treatment? A: No, I didn't feel that it was necessary since it was just a matter of paying attention.
Q: Do you wear any hearing devices? A: No, (same reason as last question)
Q: Was it hard at all to communicate either as a child or as an adult? A: All the time I face the problem of someone talking to me and I don't even know it.
Once someone mistakenly accused me of ignoring them.
Q: Do you know what your overall score was on an audiometer? A: No, I was never
tested
Parnes & Nabi (2009) mentioned in their article that the vestibular system allows for vertebrates to detect spatial position as well as motion. Timothy & Hain (2009) further elaborated that rotational movement is detected by the semi-circular canals. The vestibular system can be subdivided into the otolith organs and the semi-circular canals (SCC) (Parnes & Nabi, 2009). The otolith organs can be further divided into the utricle and saccule (Timothy & Hain, 2009). All of these canals have a pivotal role in the maintenance of balance (Fife, 2009). The SCC which contains endolymph is situated at right angles to each other and detects rotational hea...
messages to the rest of the body. The brain is made up of many different
From this point, vibration of the connective membrane (oval window) transforms mechanical motion into a pressure wave in fluid. This pressure wave enters and hence passes vibrations into the fluid filled structure called the cochlea. The cochlea contains two membranes and between these two membranes, are specialized neurons or receptors called hair cells. Once vibrations enter the cochlea, they cause the lower membrane (basilar membrane) to move in respect to the upper membrane (i.e. the tectorial membrane in which the hair cells are embedded). This movement bends the hair cells to cause receptor potentials in these cells which in turn cause the release of transmitter onto the neurons of the auditory nerve.
of as an inner ear. It is now thought to be made up of two components
The brain consists of both neurons and glia cells. The neurons, which are cells housed in a cell body called a Soma, have branches which extend from them, referred to as dendrites. From these dendrites extend axons which send and receive impulses, ending at junction points called synapses. It is at these synapse points that the transfer of information takes place.
Hearing loss is often overlooked because our hearing is an invisible sense that is always expected to be in action. Yet, there are people everywhere that suffer from the effects of hearing loss. It is important to study and understand all aspects of the many different types and reasons for hearing loss. The loss of this particular sense can be socially debilitating. It can affect the communication skills of the person, not only in receiving information, but also in giving the correct response. This paper focuses primarily on hearing loss in the elderly. One thing that affects older individuals' communication is the difficulty they often experience when recognizing time compressed speech. Time compressed speech involves fast and unclear conversational speech. Many older listeners can detect the sound of the speech being spoken, but it is still unclear (Pichora-Fuller, 2000). In order to help with diagnosis and rehabilitation, we need to understand why speech is unclear even when it is audible. The answer to that question would also help in the development of hearing aids and other communication devices. Also, as we come to understand the reasoning behind this question and as we become more knowledgeable about what older adults can and cannot hear, we can better accommodate them in our day to day interactions.
Hair cell transduction is a major part in the hearing method, by converting mechanical vibrations into electrical activity. The elaborate structures and specific roles for the thousands of inner and outer hair cells, in each cochlea, are essential to hearing. The auditory process would not work coherently, as it does in normal hearing individuals, if it were not for the multiplex functions of these hair cells. Without hearing your communication is limited and with limited communication the individual
The ability to respond to the environment is an essential aspect of life. The various sensory systems are all fine-tuned to respond to a myriad of signals from the environment allowing perception. Physiologically, a sensory system will take a physical stimulus from the environment, such as heat or a sound wave, and transduce it into an electrical response that it transmitted to the central nervous system. In the central nervous system, the signal is interpreted, and a signal is sent back via efferent neurons. The interpretation of a range of stimuli, and their respective responses, is the basis of an input-output function. In the auditory system, this is the means through which mechanical sound waves are taken in, and their varying frequencies
vertigo, and hearing loss. The hearing loss can be in one ear or unilaterally. The cause of
The ear is looked upon as a miniature receiver, amplifier and signal-processing system. The structure of the outer ear catching sound waves as they move into the external auditory canal. The sound waves then hit the eardrum and the pressure of the air causes the drum to vibrate back and forth. When the eardrum vibrates its neighbour the malleus then vibrates too. The vibrations are then transmitted from the malleus to the incus and then to the stapes. Together the three bones increase the pressure which in turn pushes the membrane of the oval window in and out. This movement sets up fluid pressure waves in the perilymph of the cochlea. The bulging of the oval window then pushes on the perilymph of the scala vestibuli. From here the pressure waves are transmitted from the scala vestibuli to the scala tympani and then eventually finds its way to the round window. This causes the round window to bulge outward into the middle ear. The scala vestibuli and scala tympani walls are now deformed with the pressure waves and the vestibular membrane is also pushed back and forth creating pressure waves in the endolymph inside the cochlear duct. These waves then causes the membrane to vibrate, which in turn cause the hairs cells of the spiral organ to move against the tectorial membrane. The bending of the stereo cilia produces receptor potentials that in the end lead to the generation of nerve impulses.
spiraling clockwise in the northern hemisphere. The opposite happens where air is warmed by the sun or by the Earth's surface temperature. The resulting rising air is above a "low." Near the surface, air flows into the "low" to replace the rising air, spiraling counter-clockwise (Atmosphere 26). Highs and lows react to each other causing a variety of conditions. Driving up or down a mountain leads to a reduction or increase of air pressure in the outer part of the ear, creating a pressure difference across the eardrum, which separates the outer ear from the middle ear. The difference distorts the eardrum, so that sounds are muffled (What is Air Pressure 9). However, this can be taken care of by swallowing air and opening the Eustachian tube between the middle ear and the nasal cavity, which in turn is joined to the mouth.
Here we wanted to see how much speech perception is affected in normal hearing population with and without presence of noise in adults and
Also, the “subjects were warned that either a square or a diamond would appear in one of the six rings, and they were to decide as fast and as accurately as possible which shape was presented.” On every trial, the outside of the target rings appeared as the distractor shape and the shape could be the same shape as either the target or the alternative target. The study found that hearing individuals showed greater distractibility from central than peripheral distractors, while deaf individuals showed the opposite. Another findings were that “in hearing individuals attention is at its peak in the center of the visual field, deaf individuals show greater attention at peripheral locations.” Lastly, the “auditory areas in the superior temporal sulcus, caudal to the primary auditory cortex, showed greater recruitment in Deaf than in hearing individuals when processing visual, tactile, or signed stimuli [23, 24,
However, I am not the only person experiencing this problem since several of my friends have confessed to experience similar instances. Although I might appear to be attentive and listening to someone, the reality is that I have actually stopped listening and my mind is focusing on the present thoughts in my head. This mostly occurs when another person utters words that my mind chooses not to examine, study, or dissect. I continue maintaining eye contact thus making another person to think that I am still keenly
The German orientalist "Shadah" describes the place of articulation as the passage from where the airflow escapes out of the body, while the place of a contact between the two organs in the production of speech sounds is called “location” “Al-Mudha”. In Arabic, there are two nasal consonants, “bilabial /m/ and alveolar /n/ (Ibid :2). Bilabial is the term which refers to the classification of a consonant sound on the basis of the place of articulation. A bilabial sound is produced by pressing or closing the upper and the lower lips.