Credit: Dr. David Furness Wellcome Collection
Intriguing and interesting reading about the phenomena of how the brain transforms physical vibration into the experience of a symphony… Here is an excerpt from the Scientific American’s interview with Neuroscientist James Hudspeth: “German scientist Hermann von Hemholtz that endures today. He recognized that the cochlea—the receptive organ of the ear—is, in essence, an inverse piano. In the piano, each of the strings represents a single tone and the output is stirred together into a harmonious whole. The ear basically undoes that work. It takes the harmonious whole, separates out the individual tones and represents each of them at a different position along the spiral cochlea. Each of the 16,000 hair cells that line the cochlea is a receptor that responds to a specific frequency. And those hair cells are in a systematic order, just as the piano strings are.
Link to the original article: here