About The Ear
Like all our senses many people take hearing for granted until it’s suddenly taken away. The ear is a well-oiled, or waxed, machine and it not only affects a person’s sense of hearing, but can also affect their sense of balance. This is why vertigo or dizziness can occur when a person has trauma or infection in the ear. Understanding how the ear works is fairly simple once you recognize the three parts of an ear: inner, middle, and outer.
Inner Ear
Inside each of our ears is a chamber called the cochlea. This chamber is shaped like a small snail and holds fluid and small hairs. The hairs are responsible for transmitting sound to the auditory nerves that send signals to our brains. By moving back and forth with the vibrations made from say your stereo playing, the sounds become amplified directly to the nerves that allow us to hear music and other sounds.
Middle Ear
The middle ear is made up of the eardrum and ossicles. The eardrum is really just a layer of tissue that vibrates when sound waves reach it. The ossicles are small bones that further amplify these sounds and transmit them to the inner ear.
Outer Ear
If you’ve ever used a funnel then you can easily understand how the outer ear works. The outer ear is like a funnel while sound waves are like the liquid that you pour into the funnel. The outer ear transmits these sound waves to the middle ear, just like a funnel carries liquid into a smaller bowl.
An injury or infection to any of the three parts of the ear can occur in hearing loss or dizziness. In fact, because the three parts of the ear rely on each other so heavily even a small injury to one area can lead to ear problems in all three parts. This is why it is so important to take care of your ears and visit a specialist as soon as you notice any problems, no matter how small they may seem.