Dancing Hair Cells!?

I found this video on youtube. It is literally a hair cell, responding to sound.

If we have the technology to pick up one hair cell, which we obviously see from the video, it may not be impossible to surgically implant healthy hair cells to people with hearing impairments…that would be amazing!

How our ears work

I love it when I see different subjects come together to explain certain things. For example, in order to explain how our lungs work (biology or physiology concept), we must first understand Ideal Gas law (PV=nRT) from chemistry or physics. I won’t go into details here, but my p0int is that we must understand physics in order to understand how our ears work.

The sound is carried through movements (vibrations) of air molecules. In the air, the sound is in the form of acoustical energy. When the sound  comes in contact with the tympanic membrane (better known as the ear drum) or the middle ear, it gets converted to mechanical energy. The mechanical energy then goes through the inner ear through cochlea, and it is converted to electronic energy by the hair cells and is transmitted to the brain to “hear” the sound.

Knowing this will help us understand what needs to be done to fix problems associated with hearing. It makes sense why hearing aids don’t work for complete deaf people (who lost their hair cells). Hearing aids amplify the mechanical energy so that less sensitive parts of our ear can sense the energy, but it cannot play a role of hair cells to convert the mechanical energy to electronic energy. If the hair cells are lost (ex. due to genetics), cochlear implant is the only way to fix the problem (unless we could implant hair cells). The patient actually gets a device inside the ear that can send electric signals to the brain.

Isn’t it so cool to see how science helps us understand what actions we need to take to solve the problem? It became a little long, but I wrote this as basic knowledge for understanding hearing impairment.