Sounds from inside the head, pressure, balance, and the muscles of the middle ear.
Showing 17 oddities.
The ear does two jobs: it turns air pressure into sound, and it tracks the position of your head. Both jobs run through small, delicate parts that occasionally do something unexpected on their own.
A tiny muscle in the middle ear is behind more than one entry here. Ear rumbling is that muscle tensing on command, in the people who can manage it at all. Tensor tympani thump is the same muscle firing automatically to protect your hearing from your own voice. BPPV is a balance problem, caused by loose crystals drifting into the wrong canal of the inner ear.
Some entries in this region are structural, like Darwin's tubercle, a small bump on the rim of some ears. Others are sounds nobody else can hear, like tinnitus. What links them is a small, crowded organ where sound, pressure, and balance all share the same real estate.
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Some earlobes hang free and others join the head directly. Textbooks taught this as one gene, but a 2017 study found at least 49 genetic regions involved, and the two shapes blend into each other.
Your own voice, breathing, or heartbeat sounds far too loud inside your head. It can mean a tube or a thin patch of bone is letting sound take a shortcut into the ear.
A short, intense spinning feeling set off by turning over in bed or tipping your head back. Tiny crystals in the inner ear have drifted into the wrong place. It is the most common cause of vertigo and it is very treatable.
A small bump on the folded rim of the ear, which Darwin thought was the leftover tip of a pointed ancestral ear. Between 10% and 58% of people have one, depending on the population.
Swallowing opens a small tube between your throat and your middle ear for a fraction of a second. The faint click you can hear is that tube letting air through to balance the pressure.
Up to about half of all people can make a low roar inside their own head by tensing a tiny muscle in the middle ear.
Moving the outer ears using three small muscles that most mammals use to point their ears at sounds. About 1 in 5 people can wiggle their ears. Some people can learn.
A tiny hole in the skin just in front of the ear, present from birth, that can lead to a tunnel under the skin. It is harmless unless it gets infected.
A whooshing or thumping in one ear that keeps time with your pulse. It is usually the sound of blood flowing near the ear. It often has a treatable cause, so get it checked.
The low thump or rumble in your ears when you yawn or shout is a tiny middle ear muscle tensing to protect your hearing from your own noise.
In a room that absorbs almost all sound, many people hear their heartbeat, their blood, their breath, or a high ringing. True silence is not possible for a living person.
A ringing, hissing, buzzing, or roaring sound with no source outside your head. Between 10% and 15% of people have it. It is mostly the hearing system filling in for damaged or tired inner-ear cells.
Opening the tubes that link the middle ear to the throat on command, without swallowing or pinching your nose. You hear a click, and your own voice gets loud. Some divers and freedivers learn it, but most never do.
These entries belong to another region first, and touch this one too.
A loud bang, crash, or explosion heard inside the head while falling asleep or waking up. Nothing actually happens, there is no pain, and it is harmless.
Some blind people find their way by making sharp tongue clicks and listening to the echoes. Brain scans show the echoes are processed in the visual cortex. Sighted people can learn a basic version in ten weeks of training.
Some people with hearing loss hear clear, complete music that no one is playing. The brain replays stored songs to fill the silence. Most people with it know the music is not real.
An often-quoted estimate is that 1 in 10,000 people can name or sing any musical note without hearing a reference note first. It runs in families and is far more common in people who started music lessons very young.