Provided by Chiropractic Newsletter Your Amazing Body, published by ICPA, Inc., written by Judy Nutz Campanale, DC, ACP, FCSC (hon)
Maybe you have heard about the biggest disagreement to hit the internet recently. People listening to the exact same recording hear completely different things. Some hear the word “yanny” and others hear the word “laurel.”
The phenomenon was first discovered when a 15-yr-old girl had a question about one of her vocabulary words and looked up the word laurel online. When she listened to the audio clip, she didn’t hear the word “laurel.” The next day at school, she asked her classmates to take a listen and their responses were completely different! Some heard the word she heard: “Yanny.” Others in her class heard the word that she originally tried to find: “Laurel.” Now hundreds of thousands of people have joined in the “Yanny or Laurel” debate.
How can we explain two people listening to the exact same thing at the exact same time and hearing two different things? The explanation lies in how absolutely AMAZING each of us is.
You probably already know that there is no one exactly like you. No looks exactly like you, even if you have a twin brother or sister! And we are as different on the inside as we are on the outside. This helps us understand why two people could listen to the same thing but hear different words.
Hearing depends on multiple parts of the body. First, your outer ear, the part that you can see, catches the sound waves travelling in the air. Because the shape and size of all of our ears are different, it makes sense that some of us can hear better or worse based on our ear shape. Have you ever seen someone put their hand to their ear when they’re having trouble hearing someone? Well, in a similar way, by placing your fingertips on the back of your ear and pushing it forward slightly, you can extend the outer ear so you can better collect all the sound waves. Try this yourself; listen to different sounds and see if you can hear a difference when you use your hands to help.
Once the sound waves reach the outer ear they travel down the ear canal to your middle ear and vibrate your sensitive eardrum. These vibrations on the eardrum jostle the three tiniest bones in your body called the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup, which are behind the eardrum. These bones pass the vibrations along to your inner ear.
Your inner ear holds a small, snail-shaped tube called the cochlea, which is filled with fluid. When the vibrations of those tiny bones reach your cochlea they create waves in the fluid. These waves force thousands of tiny hairs on the cells of the cochlea to move. These hairs are so small that you need a microscope to see them! These teeny, tiny hairs create the electrical signals that are passed along a nerve to your brain where the signals are interpreted as sounds. And this is how some people hear “yanny” while others hear “laurel.” It almost seems like magic but it shows how incredible your body is!
Our unique ears, along with the health of each of the three parts, determines how well we hear. Especially important is the brain’s ability to receive and interpret messages passed along by the nerves. This is another great reason to keep your nerve system functioning optimally, and your chiropractor can help you with that.