The Incredible Mechanics That Make You Hear

How does sound actually get inside your head? How can little vibrations in the air turn into nerve impulses? Let's meet the 100 nanometers of protein that connect you to sound

Consciousness is super weird--how do we take all these signals from the outside world and make them make sense enough to like...be alive?

However--if you examine hearing from a molecular perspective--you’ll begin to see how simple and elegant it is as a sense. We’re traveling deep into your cochlea to meet your inner ear cells and the stereocilia that make it possible for you to hear. Here, you’ll discover that hearing is just a hundred nanometers of protein tugging on a membrane. It is such a small and simple process with incredibly complex consequences.

[w]

Anyone else finding this channel for the first time in 2024? Love the art style and his enthusiasm for biology

[Ifinishedyoutube]

The reason you don't have any subscribers is not because of the quality of your content, but because of the context of your content. But this is the most important work that you can do. Please come back.

[thethoughtemporium]

Wow this was super well done. Great channel

[graemelaubach]

Hope you will be back one day. This content is so next level, there's nothing else even close.

[Zeldafan]

Biochemistry is *truly* one of the most fascinating subjects in life. How lucky are we to live in a time where we don’t just know about this stuff, but we have videos made by creators that break it down into such easily understandable segments??

[Sanquinity]

I hate that I never found this channel before. This content is amazing! Such good explanations for such complex things. Its criminal that YouTube never recommended this to me despite me watching quite a bit of science stuff...

[GabrielSantAnaCarrijo]

EXCELLENT video. Nowadays biochemistry is taught with boring powerpoint slides that don't come even close to portraying how beautiful these tiny things really are. You are being part of a very important revolution in this field.

[twothreebravo]

"We're not just mounds of meat like a sea sponge"

I feel called out. 2020 was rough though, cut me some slack.

[matthewclaveria]

This channel produces such great content! It so sad the last videos were two years ago. I wish the algorithm has advertised this better. Its honestly so well made!

[wailingalen]

Yes please comeback!! Discovering this in 2024! And more will come! This is top notch

[ShadesOfMisery]

How this channel doesn't have many, many more subscribers, I have no idea!

[hindenberg]

3:00 I just learned the cochlea is a squishy piece of biology that's performing a Fourier transform, and I can't stop thinking about it.

[rudihoffman]

I have hearing aids and every time I go to the aid office I see some similar but not as gloriously detailed vids!

[dylancarter]

please come back to making these this is the field i want to go into and this is so much more fun than a textbook. sometime's it's more indepth too

[stoliknakawe]

Holy hell man. I'm so glad YouTube algorithm brought me to your channel. It was shock when after watching your video i looked at your sub count and it wasn't in milions. The quality is amazing and videos are super clear and i teresting. Keep up and numbers will come. I subscribed immediately.

[webx]

The cool part for me is the design of the cochlea. When you hear a sound at say 440Hz, you aren't sensing something 440 times per second.

Instead, the cochlea is designed like a "Mechanical Fourier transform". For those who know what a Fourier transform is, you know what's up.

But basically, the cochlea like a prism for sound. It splits it up into all of its different frequencies, and each frequency resonates at a particular location.

By having 2 chambers filled with fluid of different density, each pitch will focus around a specific location. High frequencies at the start, and low frequencies towards the end. So when you hear a pitch, it isn't a "vibration rate" that you are interpreting, but a location. Different pitches would be like touching your arm in different locations.

If you like audio visualizers, your brain doesn't see the waveform, it sees the spectrum analyzer.

This is useful because while the brain is powerful, it is abysmally slow. Think of it like a giant processor running at like 100Hz. So it wouldn't be able to interpret a wave form. By analyzing the spectrum instead, it can instead process sounds as "shapes".

As I understand it, the human audio cortex is one of the few that is powerful enough to do echolocation. We don't use it much, but you can train it. Blind people are especially good at it because it can more easily link up with an under-stimulated visual cortex and process sound as visual/spatial information. Some people trained in it can see with a high enough resolution to identify cracks in concrete. And the cool part is that it's a 360 degree view, albeit much better towards the front than the rear.

[tarassu]

"Touch me gently" gets whole another meaning 😊

[Natgrid]

Bro nails every video...I sat and watched his entire cellular respiration in one go ..thx man ❤❤

[Daniel-pdzn]

I was a biology and chemistry major in college, and I really miss biochemistry classes! Now I am a physical therapist who educates patients on inner ear issues and how they affect balance, and fall risk for elderly patients. Although that is a different set of structures in the inner ear (otoliths and benign paroxysmal positional vertigo BPPV), from my experience as a PT, the ability to hear sound is essential to your balance and how you orient yourself in space. I view hearing sounds as analogous to depth perception. I think spatial awareness becomes gradually more impaired without hearing. I also think that for patients with dementia, it is particularly detrimental to their orientation to time, place, and even themselves, if they cannot hearing sounds to ground them to reality. It is so nice to refresh myself on the physiology with an even deeper understanding of chemistry than when I was taking those classes! thanks for your videos.

[rudihoffman]

I love everything about this program and channel, not dumbed down and showing the astounding tech evolution has enabled!