Oh, wow, oh, oh, oh, wow, oh, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, yeah. Hello, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast episode 78, hearing.

And I'm your host, James Fodor.

So in this episode, we're going to look at the human hearing system and explain how we perceive sounds and interpret them.

We'll look at the structure of the ear, moving from the outer through the middle and the inner ear, talk a bit

about the neural pathways and some of the studies of audio processing, so how we understand

and interpret audio signals with a focus on how we perceive the sound localizations at the

direction and location of sound, and we'll talk a little bit about the different

types of deafness and the cochlear implants as well. Recommended pre-listing for this

is episode 53 on sound and music, which will give you a few of the background concepts that

will help, although it's not strictly necessary, but it might be

beneficial. All right, so let's get started and talk about the structure of the year, beginning

with the outer ear, which refers to essentially the external visible parts of the ear. So the folds of

skin and cartilage surrounding the outer ear canal are called the pinner. And if you sort of look at the outer ear, you'll notice that there is a sort of intricate structure of folds and grooves and so on,

which if you think about it is kind of weird, why would these shapes be necessary?

Why don't we just have sort of a flat surface there,

like other animals do, actually? Humans are interesting because we generally can't move our ears

around nearly as much as other mammals can. And actually, mammals, in turn, are interesting

because they have external ear structures which reptiles don't.

So it's not something we think about very often, but the external ear structure, the pinner and

so on, does serve a function and its purpose is essentially to gather sound and sort of direct it

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