It actually pushes down on this membrane and Goes like that and then the fluid kind of comesĪround and goes this way, so as we have fluid flow So, you've got these little hair cells, and basically as there's fluid flow around this organ of Corti, it So, you've got little hair cells with little shark fin looking Membrane and a lower membrane, and you've also got Of look at a cross-section, what you would see is something like this.

Understand what happens, how does it turn thisįluid motion into sound. Of this organ of Corti so that we can kind of So, what we want to look at now is we just want to look at a cross-section, just a little cross-section So, now you've got fluid flow back and forth around this organ of Corti. Gets pushed out a little bit as the fluid kind of compresses it. So, when the fluid gets over here, there's this little round window, it's actually called the circular window, and the circular window Of splits the cochlea in two, and the fluid can onlyįlow in this direction. Right in the middle, there's this little structure,Īnd we call it the organ of Corti. So we've got fluid inside and that fluid basically gets pushed all the way around the cochlea and then comes back around, and as I mentioned before the reason that the fluid flows in thisĭirection is because there is actually a structure Window gets pushed in, there's fluid inside the cochlea. Gets pushed in and out as the stapes moves back and forth. The elliptical window, and the elliptical window Move back and forth, and this stapes is connected to this little oval membrane called This stapes is connected to the other two bonesĪnd then the eardrum, so it's basically moving back and forth at the same frequency as the soundwave that's making the eardrum Little bone right here, it's called the stapes, and Little bone that we were talking about earlier Just a flattened cochlea, and so you've got this So, it's this round, snail-like structure, but let's go ahead and unroll it, so we'll just unroll it and lie it flat. Let's take a closer look at the cochlea and the inner ear.

Auditory system