Summary Of Chapter 11 Hearing

While reading Chapter 11, “Hearing”, I learned some pretty interesting things. Our ability to hear events that we can’t see serves an important signaling function for both animals and humans. For an animal living in the forest, the rustle of leaves or the snap of a twig may signal the approach of a predator. For humans, hearing provides signals such as the warning sound of a smoke alarm or an ambulance siren, the distinctive high indicate problems in a car engine. Hearing not only informs us about things that are happening that we can’t see, but perhaps most important of all, it adds richness to our lives through music and facilitates communication by means of speech. The first step in understanding the perceptual process for hearing is identifying the distal stimulus. In chapter 1, the distal stimulus when using vision was the tree, in which our observer could see because the light was reflected from the tree into
First, is delivers the sounds stimulus to the receptors; second, it transduces this stimulus from pressure changes into electrical signals; and third, it processes these electrical signals so they can indicate qualities of the sound source, such as pitch, loudness, timbre, and location. The ear is divided into three divisions: the outer, middle, and inner. Sound waves pass through the outer ear, which consists of the pinnae, the structures that stick out from the sides of the head, and the auditory canal, which is a tube-like recess about 3 cm long in adults. The middle ear is a small cavity, about 2 cubic centimeters in volume, that separates the outer and inner ears. This cavity contains ossicles, malleus, incus, stapes, and the oval window. The middle ear also contains the middle-ear muscles. The main structure of the inner ear is the liquid-filled cochlea, which is the snake-like