Your Inner Piano

"Hudspeth, head of the Laboratory of Sensory Neuroscience at The
Rockefeller University, has dramatically advanced scientists’ understanding of how the ear and brain work together to process sound.

In 2018, his decades of groundbreaking research were recognized by the Norwegian Academy of Science......In the 19th century there was one really important physiological insight from the German scientist Hermann von Hemholtz that endures today.
He recognized that the cochlea—the receptive organ of the ear—is, in essence, an inverse piano.

In the piano, each of the strings represents a single tone and the output is stirred together into a harmonious whole. 

The ear basically undoes that work. 

It takes the harmonious whole, 

separates out the individual tones 

and represents each of them at a different position 

along the spiral cochlea. 

Each of the 16,000 hair cells that line the cochlea is a receptor that

responds to a specific frequency. And those hair cells are in a systematic order, just as the piano strings are.

The common currency of the nervous system is electrical. It is action potentials—streams of 1’s and 0’s, in effect—much like those in a computer.
But the currency of the external sensory world is very different.
--We have photons—that is sight.
--We have pressure—that is touch.
--We have molecules—that is smell or taste.
--And finally we have vibrations in the air—that is the essence of sound.

Each of those different types of physical stimulus must somehow be converted into the electrical signals that the brain is then capable of interpreting. That’s the transduction process.

In the case of our ears, the sound that goes into the ear is actually

mechanically amplified by the ear, and the amplification is between 100- and 1,000-fold. It’s quite profound. And the active process also sharpens the tuning of hearing, so that we can distinguish frequencies that are only about 0.1 percent apart. By comparison, two keys on a piano are 6 percent apart.

*It’s a real problem in developmental biology how you put something that complicated together." 

PocketWorthy

It's not really complicated how it came together.... for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.. Psalm 139:14