The Prepper’s Ears

Sure, there are moments when you wish you couldn’t hear the complainers or slurpers in your life. Mostly though, life is way better if your ears work right. Let’s take a look at how they operate, and see what a prepper can do for their well-being.

Ears are for hearing.  

Sure, your ears aren’t really color-coded like this, but it does make description easier:

Sound is all about vibrations; mostly vibrations from pressure waves in the air. The outer ear that we see is a funnel to bring those air pressure waves in. They make the eardrum (tympanic membrane) vibrate like a drum head. That gets a little series of levers (malleus, incus, and stapes) to moving. Those little levers amplify the vibrations and pass them on to the cochlea.

The cochlea is the real hearing organ. It’s really shaped like a long test tube that was rolled up so it would fit better inside the skull. There’s a flexible membrane (the basilar membrane) running down the middle of the test tube. The idea is that the vibrations make the fluid in the cochlea slosh around, and that makes the flexible membrane wave like a flag in the wind. The membrane has sensors that report on just how it’s waving. The brain takes that information and you hear things.

Different regions of that membrane vibrate in response to different frequencies of sound, so you can tell one pitch from another. The louder the sound, the more vigorously the membrane waves. 

Ears do not believe in “more is better”

First off, a little motivational message. Having trouble with your ears obviously can mean not hearing well. That erodes quality of life when it impairs communication or enjoyment of other sounds of course. It also makes you less safe in a variety of circumstances, be the snakes in your midst rattlers or humans.Want to hear less? Don’t protect your ears from loud sounds. Yeah, I’m talking to you, gun people who don’t wear ear protection. And you, power tool users who imagine ear muff helmets are for sissies. (Admittedly, I am female and I do wear one, but still.) 

The physiology of it is pretty intuitive. Remember that ‘membrane waves like a flag in the wind, which lets you perceive sound’ part? Ever seen a flag after it was left out in a hurricane? The flags not only get torn up, they specifically fray at the ends more than in the middle. Exposure to loud sounds does that to your basilar membrane. It gets torn up. It gets torn up especially easily at its thinnest end. Since the thinnest part responds to high pitches, high pitch hearing is lost first/most. And that hearing loss is permanent.

What’s worse than not hearing? Hearing what’s not there.

Some kinds of damage to the ears not only keep the ears from responding to the correct signals, but also generate false signals. It’s a thing nerves do when irritated. That’s why fingers tingle when they’ve been too cold and you see flashes of light when you get whacked in the head (don’t try this at home). With ears, it usually manifests as a constant, low-grade ringing or buzzing.

I’m this ringing (tinnitus) is annoying way out of proportion to what you’d expect. If it’s a response to acute damage, like a single rock concert, it will go away when the damage heals. If it’s a response to a chronic problem, it may never go away. 

A prepping-related note here relates to tinnitus and sleep. Many people with tinnitus find it most disrupting when they’re trying to sleep in a quiet environment. I don’t know if you’ve spent much time without power or traffic; but if it’s been awhile you might be surprised. It’s so quiet when there’s no fans or blowers, no distant rumble of traffic, etc. 

Good sleep is important, but how do you prep for that? Um…find a mate who snores? Adopt a bulldog? Nah, that’s probably no net gain. How about a solar charger paired with a small, dedicated mp3 player or other low-power device that can play the background sounds of your choice quietly through headphones? Salty favors ocean sounds; your tastes may vary.

Eardrum damage

Besides overly loud sounds, the most common kind of ear damage is to the eardrum. This flexible membrane stretches across the ear canal just like a drum-head. Too much pressure on one side can rupture it. Sticking pointy things in your ears can too, so don’t do stupid on that score, m’kay?

How does one get too much pressure on one side of an eardrum? Most commonly by changing altitude rapidly without equalizing (some people call it popping) one’s ears. There’s a soft tube that connects the middle ear where those bony levers are to the back of your mouth. Opening it lets a bubble of air through, which is why it’s called ‘popping’. It equalizes the pressure of the middle ear with the outside world.

I wish I’d known that on my first airline flight. I didn’t equalize, overstretched my eardrum, and spent my first day on Hawai’i almost deaf in one ear and wondering if it would be permanent. Google. Besides airline flights, elevators in really tall buildings can cause distress, and even driving up and down in the mountains if your head is congested.

The eardrum pressure problem is 20x worse under water, because it only takes 30 ft of depth to double the outside pressure. Even diving to the bottom of a pool can cause distress if you don’t equalize. Click here to meet the Valsalva maneuver, a handy way to equalize. Chewing, swallowing, and yawning often work for many people, too.

Also, be careful when entering the water not to land ear-first. I had an uncle permanently deafened in one ear when he fell into a pool and landed on the side of his head, rupturing his eardrum.

The ears are for things other than hearing: Sensing movement and gravity

Ears aren’t just for hearing and holding up glasses. See the three loopy things in the diagrams, hooked on to the side of the cochlea? Those are part of the vestibular apparatus. (Scientists get paid by the syllable, don’t ya know?)

The vestibular apparatus measures how your head is moving and which way gravity is pulling. From that, your brain can calculate how your head is moving through space. Add that to sensors that report how your joints are all bent, and you have a sense of where your whole body is and how it is moving.

If this vestibular apparatus isn’t working right, you have a major problem. Some people have two major problems.

The first problem is lack of balance, coupled with inappropriate feelings of motion (vertigo). If you’ve ever been lightheaded after a blood donation or too many drinks and felt like the world was spinning, you’ve met vertigo. 

Vertigo stinks on ice. It feels awful. And makes it impossible to even walk safely; you tend to lose your balance so much you spontaneously fall down.

Which brings up the second potential problem: Motion sickness. Everybody will tend to get motion sickness when their vestibular systems are seriously overworked, as in a zero-gravity environment. Some get it with much less vestibular work, such as riding in a car or boat. People with vertigo tend to have serious seasickness issues.

Trouble with the ears isn’t just trouble with hearing

When the cochlear nerves get irritated, you get a ringing in your ears. When your vestibular nerves get irritated, you get vertigo.

Flat-out, the most common cause of vertigo is pretty easy to fix — by not drinking (alcohol) to excess. The second most common cause is brief bouts caused by low blood pressure. Avoiding dehydration fixes a lot of that.

As far as spontaneous and ongoing issues, the most common cause is something called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. It crops up when some of the little calcium crystals in your vestibular apparatus wander somewhere they don’t belong. Blows to the head and infections make that more likely.

There’s not much to do about the condition except note what changes of head position bring on attacks and don’t do that. Nausea remedies such as ginger can help. Fortunately, this condition will usually resolve itself. That in itself is nice to know.

Good preps for your ears

So how can a prepper avoid having ear problems add misery to tough times?

• Protect your hearing by protecting yourself from loud sounds.
• If you have tinnitus, arrange for soft background sound for sleep.
• Know what pitches you can’t hear (click here if you want to take a test) and make sure those don’t match up to important alarms. Salty discovered one carbon monoxide monitor was out of his pitch range. Dumb design. We got a different monitor.
• Learn the Valsava maneuver, and use it whenever your ears start to feel uncomfortable. 
• If you have vertigo, pay attention to triggers and avoid situations where it might get you in trouble. Nausea meds might help.

Want to hear more about where physiology meets prepping? See here, feel this, or give this a taste.