Hugo Zuccarelli and Sounds ...

Hugo Zuccarelli laments the negative reaction to his reporting of facts about the ear and also shows outstanding demonstrations of holophonically created spatial accoustics played through speakers in this 1992 video.

In Beyond the Zonules of Zinn, (from the book
jacket) "David Bainbridge combines on otherworldly journey through the
central nervous system with an accessible and entertaining account of
how the brain's anatomy has often mislead anatomists about its
function."


In Chapter 8, "The Little Fish Who Never Grew Up,
The origins of the ear", a controversial contention of Hugo Zuccerelli,
that sound is produced by the ear, generally dismissed as "silly", is
expanded in the excerpt.

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/unearthed-archives-hugo-zuccarelli-part-2/1967920814


"The mammalian ear has evolved two even more useful innovations that improved its ability to serve as a microphone. The first is that it has become on active system - the brain not only receives sensory information from the cochlea, but it is also constantly modifying the cochleas's responses to sound. We now think that only a quarter of all the hair cells in your cochlea are sensory - the other three quarters are being constantly driven to vibrate by motor impulses from the brain. By wiggling selected regions of the cochlear membranes, these active hair cells can suppress spurious oscillations that reduce the ear's ability to discriminate tones - they reduce the "blur" in the sound signal. This allows us to determine pitch much more precisely, and possibly helps us distinguish among several sounds all heard at the same time. This active control of the cochlea is why Ramon y Cajal did not use the ear to show the direction that impulses pass through neurons - most of the nerve connection to the ear are motor, not sensory, with dendrites pointing to the brain and axons pointing to the sense organ. It also explains one of the weirdest phenomena in neurology: otoaccoustic emissions. Because most of the hair cells are forcing the cochlear membranes to vibrate, the cochlea actually produces sounds, and sometimes these sounds are audible to an outside listener. For example, pediatricians have reported tones being emitted from their patients' ears. This is not the same thing as tinnitus, or "ringing in the ears",in which you yourself hear the tones - the otoaccoustic emissions are genuine sounds coming out from normal ears."