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HEARING

 

Our Creator was not only capable of excellent workmanship but also very generous in his creation of the ear.  The ability to hear could have easily been engineered using a much simpler design, but such a design would not be capable of hearing the subtleties of an orchestra or a bird's song. 

Hearing starts with the pinna of the ear.  This tissue collects sound waves and focuses them towards your ear canal.  The sounds travels through the ear drum and is conducted through tiny specialized bones in the middle ear.  The sound is then sent to the cochlea which consists out of a coiled, bony canal which is lined with tissue with rows of hair cells.  A vibration as small as the width of an atom will move these hairs.  When these hair cells move it causes a change in the electrical potential of the hair cell's membrane and this change inturn triggers a current that is fed through to the auditory nerve and interpreted as sound by the brain. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HEARING LOSS

 

The ability to hear is a gift which connects you to other people.  As with many things in life, we often take our hearing for granted until it starts deteriorating or is suddenly lost.  Hearing loss can isolate an individual to the extent that you begin avoiding family and social gatherings, meetings and outings with friends as well as telephone calls.  

The majority of adult hearing loss is seen in the high frequencies, causing a sloping sensory/neural hearing loss, usually caused by aging and/or noise exposure.  Hearing loss occurs when the tiny hair cells are either damaged or die and the gradual process often starts between 30 and 40 years of age.

Other types of hearing loss would be considered conductive or mixed.  Conductive hearing loss is not necessarily permanent and usually concerns the outer and/or middle ear systems.  A mixed loss would be a hearing loss that is considered both sensory/neural as well as conductive. 

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