Extraordinary Acoustic Transmission in Human Hearing System

This invited talk introduces how extraordinary acoustic transmission plays an important role to detect sounds in human hearing system. This new approach from engineering point of view is totally different from that of V. Békésy's traveling wave theory which has been widely accepted up to today. To elucidate human hearing mechanism, we focus on architecture of sensory hair cells. That is, the wall of the cell has three-layered structure consisting of plasma membrane, cortical lattice, and subsurface cisternae. Our theoretical study indicates that the plasma membrane and cortical lattice form an extraordinary acoustic transmission system to detect sounds with extremely high resolution and sensitivity, and subsurface cisternae works as a sound reflector to protect DNA in nucleus against damages caused by higher sound pressures for resonance.