Protect Your Hearing Ability

Whether you look at the animals or consider yourself, doubtless you will admit that hearing ability truly is amazing. And surely you will want to care for and protect your hearing apparatus.

Your ears are being assailed by many unwanted sounds in this modern world. Noise pollution has become quite a problem in many places. If you must work around excessively loud machinery, for example, the use of earplugs may be advisable. They may protect you against ear injury and hearing loss.

If you now are a tobacco user, another way to protect your hearing is to stop using tobacco. The nicotine in tobacco causes constriction of inner-ear arteries. This, in turn, reduces blood flow and consequently the flow of nourishment that the inner ear needs in order to play its vital role in your life.

Never probe in your ears with objects such as hairpins or matchsticks. If you break the skin in this way, infection may result.

Do you have your ears examined from time to time? Well, having periodic ear examinations would not be amiss. It certainly pays to protect your amazing ability of hearing.

The Amazing Ability of Hearing

IF YOU possess good hearing, you have something truly precious. Just think! You can listen to the melodious song of a bird, the ripple of a brook, the voice of a loved one. Through your ears you can receive lifesaving messages, too​—perhaps from an automobile horn, a siren or a fire alarm.

Yet, have you really given much thought to your amazing sense of hearing? And what about that possessed by other creatures? Even a brief investigation can be intriguing.

How Are You Able to Hear?

A glance at the accompanying illustration shows that your ear is much more than that trumpetlike organ on the side of your head. That part is merely the auricle. It catches sound waves and sends them inward, along the external auditory canal. In it are tiny hairs and wax-producing glands. Their purpose? To prevent dust, insects, and so forth, from going deeper and causing damage.

When sound waves reach the end of the canal, they strike your eardrum, composed of thin, taut tissue. Its resulting vibrations are amplified and transmitted in your middle ear by three minute bones, the auditory ossicles. They are commonly called the hammer, anvil and stirrup because of their shapes. The stirrup “taps” the membrane of the “oval window,” transmitting the vibrations to your fluid-filled inner ear. Sound waves also enter the inner ear through the “round window,” below the “oval window.” Some waves even travel through your skull bones into the inner ear.

Above the inner ear’s central vestibule are the semicircular canals. Movements of fluid within them enable you to maintain physical balance. However, hearing is associated with the cochlea. Sound waves passing through fluid set in motion the cochlea’s basilar membrane. In turn, its movement causes vibration of the hair cells making up the organ of Corti. This motion stimulates the nerves attached to the hair cells. Finally these nerves, through the auditory nerve, send messages as electrical impulses to your brain’s hearing center. All of this is well known, but just how a person can understand such signals continues to baffle men of science.

A Word About What You Hear

You cannot hear every sound that surrounds you, and that is a good thing. As a babe in arms, your auditory range may have run from 15 to 30,000 cycles, or vibrations, a second. But say that it was very far below 15 cycles. Why, then you would hear your own heartbeats, even your bone and muscle movements!

Though it has certain limitations, your hearing range is astounding. While individuals differ, in general the loudest sound that one can tolerate is 2,000,000,000,000 times as great as the least perceptible sound! Indeed, the human ear has the maximum sensitivity practical for its needs.

As the years pass, of course, imperfect humans experience progressive loss of hearing ability. Among other things, this is because tissues of the inner ear lose their elasticity. The upper level of the auditory range reportedly drops from 30,000 cycles when one is a baby to around 4,000 cycles by the time one is eighty. Nevertheless, even that is enough for normal conversation.

Truly a Masterwork!

Your ears have built-in protection against extremely loud noises. Of course, a sudden nearby explosion can result in excessive vibrations that could cause irreparable damage to your intricate hearing apparatus. But if a very loud sound develops gradually, quick-acting muscles can ‘turn down the volume.’ The eardrum’s membrane is tightened to reduce its vibrations, and middle-ear muscles twist the auditory ossicles. Thus the stirrup does not transmit such great vibrations through the “oval window” into the inner ear.

Protection also is afforded by the Eustachian tube, running from the nasal cavity to the middle ear. This passageway carries air and equalizes the pressure inside your eardrum with that outside. Here, then, is a safeguard against the breaking of your eardrum due to a great change in external air pressure.

Think, too, about the sounds you hear. In an amazing way, you distinguish between the rumble of thunder and the clatter of wagon wheels, the footsteps of a person and the hoofbeats of a horse, even if you cannot see their source. Moreover, usually both ears can be ‘tuned in’ on sounds. Perhaps you dropped a coin and did not see where it rolled. Yet, you heard it hit the floor, possibly bouncing a time or two. Then you listened as it rolled and struck a chair. Finally, you heard the coin flop over and reverberate before coming to rest. Both ears help you to locate the spot.

Not without good reason, it has been said of the human ear: “If an engineer were to duplicate its function, he would have to compress into approximately one cubic inch a sound system that included an impedance matcher, a wide-range mechanical analyzer, a mobile relay-and-amplification unit, a multichannel transducer to convert mechanical energy to electrical energy, a system to maintain a delicate hydraulic balance, and an internal two-way communications system. Even if he could perform this miracle of miniaturization, he probably could not hope to match the ear’s performance.”​—Sound and Hearing, by S. S. Stevens, Fred Warshofsky and the editors of Life, page 38.

Yes, the human ear truly is a masterwork. How well it demonstrates the wisdom of Jehovah God, the incomparable Maker of the hearing ear!​—Prov. 20:12.