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| How Does It Work? | |
The ear has three main parts: the outer, middle and inner ear. The outer ear (the part you can see) opens into the ear canal. The eardrum separates the ear canal from the middle ear, small bones in the middle ear help transfer sound to the inner ear. The inner ear contains the auditory hair cells, which leads to the brain.
Any source
of sound sends vibrations or sound waves into the air. These funnel through the
ear opening, down the ear canal, and strike the eardrum, causing it to vibrate.
The vibrations are passed to the smaller bones of the middle ear, which
transmit them to the hearing nerves in the inner ear.
There, the vibrations of the hair cells activate the nerves connected to
the brain, which interprets the impulses as sound: music, a slamming door, a
voice etc.
When noise is too loud, it
begins to kill the hair cells in the inner ear.
As the exposure time to loud noise increases, more and more nerve endings
are destroyed.
As the number of nerve endings decrease, so does
your hearing.
There is no way to restore life to dead nerve endings; The damage is permanent.
For more information on the ear and hearing protections, see 'Commonly Asked Questions, and Their Answers"
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