Bones are utterly amazing to me. As has been stressed to me many times throughout my anatomy experiences, form follows function. Within the bones, this creates some astounding structures. The 3 bones pictured above are the bones of the inner ear. Generally considered the smallest bones of the body, they also have some of the largest impact on our life! Imagine living your life without hearing laughter, communicating without sound, or just orienting yourself to daily life and your surroundings without sound to guide you. These three little bones fit together like this:
And they are the critical component of transmitting the sound waves that reach them into the cochlea as mechanical signals, which are then sent on to the brain as electrical signals. Pretty cool, the human body is! If you want to see the bones in action, follow this link. This semester I have also learned that the inner ear bones evolutionarily originated as gills in our primordial ancestors, then became a part of the jaw, then migrated further to become our ear bones, which allow more evolutionarily advanced animals (such as ourselves) to have the hearing and balance (which is also a major function of the ear) capabilities we have. Like I said, pretty cool stuff!
Like I said, the cochlea changes its input (mechanical, from the incus, stapes, and malleus) into a very different output (electrical, going to the brain), and it does this with its very particular anatomy and form, its many hair cells. As it is Thursday today, I went to Rayne/the Bright School for my service learning assignment. As today is also Yom Kippur (a Jewish holiday), and I attend a school that is 30+% Jewish, today was a university declared academic holiday, so we had no classes! This allowed me to spend the morning and afternoon at the school today with B and C. I knew that in the mornings there is more of a class atmosphere and was interested in how this worked. I met B and C's other Bright School classmates, blond B, M, G, and W. All have some sort of speech difficulty, from delayed speech to down's syndrome. I actually really enjoyed working with the students this morning, as it is much more structured and focused. I felt accomplished when W declared to me, out of the blue, in a complete, sensical sentence, that he had 3 pockets and there was money in 1 of them-we had been working on stringing words together in a cohesive manner and he was able to put it into use! I also discovered my inner play-doh master and the girls and I made all sorts of butterflies and hearts, which they counted and named, big steps for them. Perhaps the biggest thrill of the day came later, when I was playing with B this afternoon and she pulled me over to a table, promptly threw her foot up onto the table, demanded I tie her shoe following the steps in the book (ps-if you are ever planning on working with 3-5 year olds, brushup on your bunny-ear shoe-tying skills!). I did it once with her following along in the book and directing me. Then she shoved my hands away and correctly counted, ALOUD, the laceholes in her sneakers, which numbered greater than 5, which until that morning had been her counting threshold, and then proceeded to, brow furrowed, follow the directions and tie her own shoe! It was pretty exciting stuff! Now I'm not sure if she actually knows how to tie her shoes, but I do know that last week I tied them about 75 times for her to practice, so it is at the very least a new skill, if not a brand-new skill! C and I had a pretty exciting afternoon too, we colored and she said the color and shape of each item as I drew it. Both B and C have physical hearing impairments, which makes them less inclined to speak aloud, as they cannot "hear themselves" when they speak. So most of my work has been to get them to verbalize their speech-I am uniquely qualified for this in that I don't sign at all, so to communicate with me they have to speak! It was a long and exhausting day, but it was nice too.
This evening I held a review session for my anatomy labs. They have their first tag exam next week, and are all freaking out about it. It was a pretty rough week with the lab sections, one in particular, please see previous post, so I was not really looking forward to today's review session. In general I think it went pretty well, I heard a few students on their way out say "I don't feel so overwhelmed now," which is the whole goal. I also had a pair of students from said difficult lab come up to me at the end of tonight's session and tell me that they had talked about their behavior in lab earlier in the week and felt like they owed me an apology. So it was nice to have them recognize their behavior and acknowledge that to me. I spent much of the time tonight reviewing the skull, specifically the skull's foramina. The picture above includes all of the foramina they need to know, and even includes a handy guide of which cranial nerve runs through which foramen. All of the anatomy students are (not so secretly) thinking I am a bit mean for making all of the above foramina their responsibility to know. I think I am being pretty generous, considering the below picture is the image from one of the reference books I have (and it's not even from Gray's-that book has about 100 foramina to know on the skull!) and that could have been the list they had to know!
