Your Ears Are Weird. Here’s Why
Your ears are busy little overachievers.
Sure, they help you hear music, conversations, alarms and the mysterious sound your car starts making approximately three days after the warranty expires. But hearing is only part of their job.
Your ears are connected to balance, pressure, nerves and several other systems in your body, which means they occasionally do some very strange things.
Here are a few of our favorites.
Why do your ears pop?
Air pressure on the inside of your eardrum usually matches the pressure outside your ear. But when the outside pressure changes quickly, like during takeoff in an airplane or while driving through the mountains, your middle ear needs a moment to catch up.
That little pop is your Eustachian tube opening to equalize the pressure.
Yawning, swallowing or chewing gum can help it along.
Why can you sometimes hear your heartbeat in your ear?
Every once in a while, you may notice a soft whoosh-whoosh-whoosh that seems perfectly synchronized with your heartbeat.
You're not imagining it. Sometimes we can actually hear blood moving through vessels near the ear.
An occasional awareness of your heartbeat can happen, but a persistent rhythmic sound in one or both ears is worth mentioning to a healthcare professional. This type of tinnitus is called pulsatile tinnitus, and it can have causes that should be evaluated.
Why do your ears ring after a loud concert?
That high-pitched eeeeeeeeee after a concert isn't your ears applauding the encore.
Loud sound can temporarily disrupt the delicate sensory cells and neural pathways involved in hearing. Ringing, buzzing or humming after loud noise is a warning sign that your auditory system has been stressed.
If you're heading somewhere loud, hearing protection is a very good idea. Your future ears would like a word.
Why do you get dizzy when your ears are involved?
Your ears aren't just responsible for hearing. Deep inside each ear is your vestibular system, a tiny sensory system that helps your brain figure out where your head is and how you're moving.
That's why problems in the inner ear can sometimes make you feel dizzy, off-balance or like the room is spinning.
Your ears have essentially been quietly moonlighting as your body's internal gyroscope this whole time.
Why do your ears sometimes feel clogged when you have a cold?
Remember those Eustachian tubes?
They connect your middle ears to the back of your nose and throat. When you're congested, inflammation and mucus can interfere with their ability to regulate pressure and drain normally.
The result can be pressure, popping, muffled hearing or that annoying underwater feeling.
Your ears didn't catch the cold. They're just caught in the traffic jam.
Why can certain sounds make you physically cringe?
A fork scraping across a plate. Styrofoam rubbing together. Someone chewing directly into a microphone.
Some sounds trigger a much stronger reaction than others because hearing isn't just about your ears. Your brain processes sound and connects it with emotion, attention, memory and the body's threat-response systems.
That's why one person's harmless background noise can be another person's immediate ticket out of the room.
Why do your ears keep working while you sleep?
Your ears don't clock out when you do.
Sound continues entering your auditory system while you're asleep. Your brain simply changes how it processes and responds to it.
That's why you might sleep through the hum of an air conditioner but wake instantly when someone says your name, a child cries or something goes BANG downstairs.
Your brain is still listening. It's just being selective.
And perhaps the weirdest thing about your ears…
Hearing doesn't really happen in your ears.
Your ears collect sound and convert it into signals, but your brain is ultimately responsible for interpreting those signals as voices, music, laughter, footsteps and everything else you recognize.
In other words, your ears are the microphones.
Your brain is running the sound booth.
And considering how complicated that system is, it's pretty remarkable that most of the time we don't have to think about it at all.
At Hough Ear Institute, we're fascinated by the science of hearing because understanding how this extraordinary system works is the first step toward protecting it, repairing it and finding better treatments when something goes wrong.
Your ears may be weird.
We think that's part of what makes them wonderful.