Let me get this straight. We all know that the function of our ears is to hear things. Ears are like our microphone, which hears things and signals them to the brain through acoustic nerves.
The one more important function that the ears can do is body balancing. The ear functions as a sense of hearing and works as a sense of balance. Our brain controls the balance through the skeleton, muscular and nervous systems.
The common function of ears:
The sensory organ ear consists of 3 parts:
- Outer ear
- Middle ear
- Inner ear
The ear collects all the sound waves around it, similar to an antenna that collects radio waves. The sound wave passes into the outer ear and reaches the middle region where the eardrum is located. The eardrum amplifies the sound waves into the inner ear through 3 tiny bones.
The last part, the inner ear, can produce nerve impulses( a response transfer from one neuron to another and finally to the brain) when it gets disturbed. Those impulses get through the brain through neurons (functional units of nerves) to the brain. The brain processes it and decodes the sound waves. This is how the sense of hearing works.
Interesting fact:
Do you wonder why we have two ears? The answer is sound localisation. It is a process that helps find where the sound waves come from.
Body balancing by ear:
The inner part of the ear monitors this feature. Let’s get this inflow of processes:
The inner part contains a system called the vestibular system. This system consists of 3 canals named semicircular canals.
- Posterior semicircular canal
- Superior semicircular canal
- Lateral semicircular canal
If it is a canal and the fluid present in it is known as endolymph.
Occurs in the inner ear:
The location of the ear, which is in the skull, is the main factor required to control balance. The fluid called endolymph moves in the canal whenever we move our heads. Thus the motion of our head can be tracked. A particular hair cell called cilia in the canal also moves, causing nerve impulses.
Occurs in the brain:
Soon after the nerve impulses reach the cerebrum part of the brain, the cerebellum analyses the motion based on the type of canal.
Let’s break that up in a simple example:
The principle is to find the tilting motion.
- If we tilt our head up and down, the superior semicircular canal creates a motion that causes the fluid endolymph to move and so the cilia. This helps the brain find out how our head moves and grasps a “yes” motion, and this name is because we sign to someone to say yes without saying a word.
- If we tilt our head from side to side, the lateral semicircular canal develops a motion that turns out to cause the above principle. As we saw in the first point, the brain catches it up as a “no” motion because we sign side to side to say no.
- If we tilt our head towards our shoulder, the posterior semicircular canal creates a motion similar to the above one. This makes the brain know the exact movement of our head.
How is the ear responsible for balancing?
It can be proved with an experiment. There is a game where one has to touch a tip of a football marker cone and is asked to rotate it for about 10- 15 turns without a gap. The upcoming part is the more difficult one: walk a few feet and aim a football into the post.
I have experience with this game; to be honest, I failed at my first attempt. The reason behind this is that I lost my balance. The scientific answer is, once I start to revolve around a cone touching it with my hand, the fluid and the cilia in the canal get moved. Once I stopped rotating, due to the law of inertia: the inertia of motion- an object will persist in moving at the same speed until a force acts on it (for example, if we put brakes on a running car, we are forced to move forward.)
This happens in the semicircular canal, where the fluid moves after we stop. This false information is sent to the brain, making it believe that I am still in motion, causing a temporary collapse in our muscular system that generates an imbalance in our position. The recovery happens within seconds soon after the fluid is not in motion. This is how we get dizziness after doing such things as playing merry-go-round or on an adventurous trip.
