It's Your Ears that Balance Your Life

What you hear affects your emotions. Whether it is what someone is saying to you, a song that is happy or sad, an annoying dog, hearing others arguing or the sound of tree leaves rustling in a gentle breeze. Life would be extremely different without being able to hear.

But what is going on inside ears is far beyond all of man’s technology. For no reason I can explain, ears are not only for hearing but right there inside your ear is the boss of all your balance.

Did you ever experience vertigo? It is a terrible feeling affecting your normal balance and it makes many nauseous.

Imagine how terrible your life would be with no balance at all. You could not sit in a wheelchair without balance. Thankfully, that is not our story and there is so much technology contributing to our normal lives WITH balance.

You have 3 inner tubes in each ear and all six of these have liquid. Like a tilted glass of water, the glass tilts but the water remains horizontal to the earth.

So if you are walking down a hill, imagine carrying 3 glasses of water on either side of you. That seems like overkill but it is probably creating greater accuracy with six than with two.

What is continually fascinating about every clever system and design in the human body is its connection to relevant systems.

Your ears are utilizing the principles of gravity from the earth to keep you comfortably balanced on this planet.

If you are walking down steps and feel like you are losing your balance or misstep, instinctively you will grab the wall or a handrail if there is one. You don’t decide that, it is an immediate instinct stabilizing your balance. In fact, a reaction to the signals from your ears to brain to body in a millisecond.

There is more to all of this, don't you think?

If you were to design a hearing ear, you would also need to know something about sound, sound waves, volume decibels, high and low pitch ranges (humans typically 20 to 20,000 Hz). What else?

Besides the many logistics of functioning parts responding to specific parts of sound, it is all meaningless without the connection to the brain and the brain knowing how to interpret those sounds. But sound waves (pressure) is the wrong language for the brain, so in the ear is the translator converting pressure to electric signals so the brain can understand.

You understand, the brain doesn't do this, the ear is the one translating sound waves to electric messaging so the brain can understand.

We've copied some of this technology for speakers (the ear drum). There is a new super antennae that can pick up ANY radio frequency and its design is inspired by the design in the human ear. It can perceive about a million times more frequencies but I have enough trouble hearing barking dogs in the neighborhood. I don't think I want to hear a million times more than I do. Again, design. LINK on super antennae

The reason balance is not listed as the sixth sense is because is probably because it is a combination of sensory info. In fact, different parts of our inner ear plus our vision and brain want to agree.

As a teen, the first time I felt queasy was on a disorienting ride in Clementon, New Jersey. It was a bench that did not move but the room rocked and eventually spun around me. I felt sick. No spinning, just a disagreement between my eyes and sense of balance.

The maintenance on your ears? Earwax. Yup. New ear wax is antimicrobial. The new wax uses a conveyor belt method to clean out the old ear wax. All the other great stuff inside your ear you don't see, but we clean our ears because we see that. Earwax helps protect against fungus, insects and water also.

When I was a kid, the doctor told me the only thing I should put in my ear was my elbow. Yeah, of course I tried.

I must stop now. The massive and diverse technology in our ears cannot be achieved by accidental luck, but technology greater than man requires intelligence greater than man, but I'll let you decide.

P.S. It is amazing to me that a few days after sending this blog post to my subscribers that 3 of us happened on a cafe in metro Manila where a church service for the deaf was going on for about 40 people. I loved watching pondering the volume of communication absorbed visually.