"Building the Musical Muscle"
By: Brenda Huerta
The Musical Tissue
I chose to review this TED talk because it I am widely interested in new developments that scientists have discovered that will allow them to build new and functioning tissues. Just watching YouTube videos of people being able to hear for the first time brings tears of joy to me. A few years ago, these ideas would not have seemed possible. Charles Limb explains how he performed cochlear implantation. He states that "most people that lose their hearing lose it at what's called the cochlea, the inner ear. And it's at the hair cell level that they do this". Most people don't fully understand how we pick up sound and how it is a really long process that happens very quickly. He continues by saying that "It's acoustic vibrations in the air, little waves of energy in the air that tickle our eardrum. Somehow in tickling our eardrum that transmits energy down our hearing bones, which get converted to a fluid impulse inside the cochlea and then somehow converted into an electrical signal in our auditory nerves that somehow wind up in our brains as a perception of a song or a beautiful piece of music". Because of people like Charles, multiple people have allowed the growth of different tissues or technology that greatly impact our world . These "hand made" muscles are something that would help thousands of people.