Within today’s boisterous world of frequent distraction, very few people stop to consider the means through which they understand all of this audible stimuli: the ears; and a lot fewer still take the proper safeguards to defend their ears when they should, even using so simple as ear plugs. Needless to say ear plugs sound like a ridiculous, not entirely necessary precaution in most situations – and in a lot of situations, they aren’t essential – but understanding the significance of your ears is key to protecting them.
Ears are certainly used for hearing and interpreting sound. Sound – which are waves of pressure traveling via a medium, whether it be air, water, or something else – is first “heard” when it is trapped by the external ear (which is the seen part on either side of our head, and what we first think when we think of “ears”). These pressure waves, or sound, are then filtered through the outer portions of the ear right until they interact with the ear drum and internal ear (those parts of the organ positioned inside of your skull), where they stimulate hair cells, transmitting nervous signals to the brain. These signals are then interpreted as sound. Yes supplies for protection come in numerous forms.
Because of to the physically miniscule and delicate nature of the ear, it is very susceptible to physically trauma, which can even be caused by the aggressive vibrations caused by excessive noise levels. Picture a speaker system or a subwoofer: the way the speaker cones vibrate as they emit sound is related to the way the small bones and tissues of the inner ear vibrate as they are stimulated by sound. And same as a subwoofer or speaker can break under the stress of these vibrations at high volume, so too can the components of the human ear. Sounds experienced at places like construction zones or rock concerts are effortlessly able to damage the ear over long periods of exposure. By simply blocking these sounds from entering the ear, ear plugs can prevent this.
Except for protecting your actual capacity to hear, the protection offered by ear plugs also maintains another critical function of the ears that is significantly less clear: one’s sense of balance. Actually, balance is one of the two main reasons that mammals generally have two ears (the other is that two ears allow us to locate the source of sounds by localizing them, similar to the way two working eyeballs allow depth perception). Deep inside the inner ear are the organs responsible for determining one’s orientation to gravity, and a sense of equilibrium.
Small fluid loaded sacks send nerve signals to the brain which usually interprets these signals to create a sense of physical orientation against the background environment. Since the fluid inside these sacks is subject to the very same laws of gravity as the rest of the body, the brain can interpret their orientation the same way you may if you saw a soda bottle half filled. No matter what angle you look at it, you can decide a sense of up and down by seeing in which direction gravity pulls the left over fluid inside the bottle.
