One of the more interesting parts about being a neuroscientist is when I'm suddenly struck by how absolutely weird our brains are.
And I'm not even talking about the super trippy stuff like free-will; even the mundane things are really mind-boggling.
For example: what does it mean to experience the world around us? We "see" things because photons that manage to pass through the inside-out design of our retinal cells cause a molecular change in the photoreceptors such that 11-cis-retinal isomerizes... etc.
(Tons of way overly detailed biology cut from here...)
When we "hear" things, the sound pressure waveform hits the tympanic membrane (eardrum) and ultimately causes the basilar membrane in your cochlea to vibrate. The basilar membrane is stiffer at one end (the basal end) and less stiff at the other end (the apical end). This fact was observed by Georg von Békésy (and earned him the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine).
READ THE FULL STORY HERE...
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