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Hearing

Spreading the fluid word

Nature volume 402, pages 476–477 (1999)Cite this article

In Fantastic Voyage, the 1966 sci-fi film classic, Racquel Welch and her intrepid team of brain surgeons are shrunk to nanometre dimensions and sent on a journey through the human body. Escaping killer lymphocytes, they get entangled within the cochlea of the inner ear and are buffeted by the sounds as they enter the fluids of the duct. What the leading lady, although appropriately clad in a wetsuit, failed to do was to take any measurements of the fluid flow in the cochlea. Students of cochlear mechanics have regretted the lost opportunity ever since. Over 30 years later, reporting on page 526 of this issue, Elizabeth Olson1 has managed to make just such biophysical measurements, with implications for the way we think about models of hearing.

The organs of hearing, on either side of the human head, are coiled compartments within the temporal bones. If the coils were straightened out, each cochlea would be 34 mm long in humans and about one-third of that size in small mammals2. The basilar membrane — a collagen-fibre membrane no more than 0.5 mm wide — divides the cochlea along its length. This membrane, together with the sensory hair cells of the organ of Corti that also span the length of the cochlea, transmits information about incoming sounds into a pattern code sent to the brain via the auditory nerve. The idea is that each component sound frequency is mapped by the mechanics onto a unique pattern of displacements of the membrane.

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Figure 1: The cochlea uncoiled.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physiology, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK

    Jonathan Ashmore & Jessica de Boer

Authors
  1. Jonathan Ashmore
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  2. Jessica de Boer
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Correspondence to Jonathan Ashmore.

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Ashmore, J., de Boer, J. Spreading the fluid word. Nature 402, 476–477 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/44985

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