Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
From the brains behind Brains On, this is the Moment of Um. Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Anna Goldfield. Um.
Today, I am having a friendly dispute with my pal, Anna Weigel. I'm telling you, those are the lyrics. I have a memory like a steel trap. Buddy, I don't think it goes. The neck bones connect to the head bones. The head bones connect to the ear bones. I mean, yeah, sure, you've got ear bones, but they're not connected to your skull. Hang on a dang second. I have ear bones? Bony ears? I thought that part of the song was a joke.
Not bony ears, exactly. It's more like, well, just listen to this. My name is Wyatt from Dahlonega, Georgia. And my question is, why don't ears have bones? My name is Olivia Birmingham McDonough. My pronouns are she and her. And my job title is professor at the University of Washington.
So the question was, why don't the ears have bones? And the ears actually do have bones. But what we think of and what we look at is a thing called our outer ear. And you can divide our whole ear into three parts.
So our outer ear is this piece that you see that we always point to and say, "There's our ear," and it is. And it's really flexible and bends, so you know there's no bone in there because you can bend it towards, you can twist it many ways.
Okay, so what bones are in the ear? Well, there are three little bones in the ear. And what's really interesting about them is they are the smallest bones in the body. And the middle ear is where these little bones live. So the sound comes in and it hits the eardrum, which is exactly what you think of. It's like a drum. And it pushes against these little bones.
And then that actually puts the signal into the inner ear. Now in the inner ear, you actually detect if someone is speaking to you, if there is a car going by, if it's a noisy room or it's a really quiet room. And as humans, like us, we can actually hear over a very wide range of sounds. So you can hear someone whisper to you and you can also hear someone shout at you.
So that's an interesting fact of humans. Now the inner ear, this really small structure, can be taken, if you took it out of a human being, if you put it on a dime, it would fit. That's how small it is. So we have to take care of our hearing because generally over our lifespan as we get older, we lose hearing. So there are bones in the ear and they're in this space called the middle ear.
So there are three little bones in there, and then they link to the inner ear, and that's where we hear. Um, um, uh... Holy beans, I do have ear bones! The outside of my ear is cartilage and skin, and a great place to display my favorite dinosaur earrings. But inside, I've got ossicles, tiny bones, helping me with my hearing and balance. I'm gonna go dance on a balance beam while listening to music and let my ossicles shine.
If you like this episode, take a second to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you've got a question that's got you all aflutter, check out the Brains On podcast where we have a whole episode all about flutterbys. I mean, butterflies. If you have a moment of um question, we'd love to help you answer it. Drop us a line by going to brainson.org slash contact. See you next time. And the next day. And the next day. And every weekday. Until then, um...
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