Anterolateral View Of The Inner Ear
Anterolateral View of the Inner Ear
To finish off the ear (for now!) Here is the Inner ear. You can break the ear down into two main functional parts. There is the Vesitbule which is dedicated to balance, and the Chochlea which is dedicated to hearing.
If we go back to the middle ear for a second, sound waves there have been converted into mechanical vibrations which have then come to the inner ear where the Cochlea then propagates these signals as waves in fluid and membranes and finally transduces them to nerve impulses which are transmitted to the brain. If you have an engineering type chum, ask them about the challenge of converting sound waves into fluid waves and you will get an idea of the complexity of what is going on and thats even before mentioning nerve pulses.
The Vestibule works in conjunction with your sight is responsible for the senses of balance and motion. It uses fluid and tiny hair cells, to get information about attitude, rotation and linear motion of the head, which it converts into pulses and sends to the brain.
Moving onto the drawing, you can see in the top left hand corner a quick rundown of the pencils I used. I’m not entirely happy with the sketch, mainly I think I need a bit of a better reference on the actual surface.
Of interest, I did take some photos of the drawing as I went along, you can see them in the fotki album here (they will be on the last page) and I have added some notes in the photo descriptions. These pictures are also on my flickr stream which you can find from my previous post.
