“The Ear: Masterpiece of Engineering”

So the book Sound and Hearing describes our organ of hearing. The book adds: “Yet behind [the outer ear] lie structures of such delicacy that they shame the most skillful craftsman, of such reliable automatic operation that they inspire awe in the most ingenious engineer.”

Just think: miniaturized into a space about one square inch (6 square centimeters) is an entire high-fidelity receiving and transmitting system. From the outer ear (which gathers the sound waves) through the middle ear (which converts the sound waves into mechanical movements) to the inner ear (which transforms the mechanical movements into electrical impulses), we see evidence of really sophisticated design.

In the cochlea (a part of the inner ear resembling a snail’s shell [note the picture above]), the real miracle occurs. It is here that mechanical movements are converted into electrical impulses and fed to the brain, which decodes these as sounds. To accomplish this function 24,000 tiny hairs within this organ act as the strings of a piano. The sound waves cause movements within the cochlea from which these “strings” then reproduce the various tones. Through nerves attached to these hairs electrical impulses are sent to the brain. One reference work says: “Since the cochlea in a pianist’s ear is approximately a million times smaller than the piano upon which he plays, one must imagine the keyboard and strings of a concert piano reduced about 100 million times in order to arrive at the dimensions of the auditory ‘piano’ in the ear.” Our “piano” reproduces perfectly every sound—from a faint whisper to the crescendo of a great orchestra—and all of this within a part the size of a pea! Design or accident? Have you ever heard even of a grand piano that came into existence by pure accident?

[Picture on page 9]

“The cochlea [a part of the ear] . . . is a musical instrument of complicated structure resembling that of a piano”