(Phys.org) -- The word “cochlea” comes from the Latin for “snail shell.” While this inner ear component has a clear spiral shape, it’s currently unclear why that is. In the 1980s, scientists supposed ...

Shortly before his death in August 2025, A. James Hudspeth and his team in the Laboratory of Sensory Neuroscience at The Rockefeller University achieved a groundbreaking technological advancement: the ...

The next time someone whispers in your ear, think "cochlea." The cochlea is the marvelous structure in the inner ear that is shaped like a snail shell and transforms sounds into the nerve impulses ...

Sitting at the kitchen table rolling a ball of Play-Doh, Oliver Campbell is a picture of childhood contentment. At just under two years old he is experimenting with words and is happily peppering his ...

Until now, the part of the ear that processes speech was poorly reflected in computer models, but University of Michigan researchers have figured out the math that describes how it works—which could ...

The cochlea is key to human hearing, and it plays an important role in our understanding of complex frequency content. The Visual Ear project aims to illustrate the cochlear mechanism as an ...

The ongoing debate about the mechanism by which the mammalian inner ear amplifies incoming sounds now sees the publication of new evidence in favour of a mechanism driven by an influx of calcium ions ...

The cochlea is the portion of the inner ear that senses sound vibrations and converts them into electrical signals that the auditory system can interpret. The cochlea is an example of active cellular ...

For decades, hearing experts thought that the cochlea's spiral shape was simply an efficient packing job and its shape had no effect on how this critical hearing organ functions. But a recent study by ...

The human inner ear has an intricate spiral shape often compared to shells of mollusks, particularly to the nautilus shell. It has inspired many functional hearing theories. The reasons for this ...

Some people are born with hearing loss, while others acquire it with age, infections or long-term noise exposures. In many instances, the tiny hairs in the inner ear’s cochlea that allow the brain to ...