Organ of Corti - Citizendia

Organ of Corti

A cross section of the cochlea illustrating the organ of Corti.

Section through the spiral organ of Corti. Magnified.
Latin	organum spirale
Gray's	subject #232 1056
MeSH	Organ+of+Corti
Dorlands/Elsevier	o_06/12596269

The organ of Corti (or spiral organ) is the organ in the inner ear of mammals that contains auditory sensory cells, or "hair cells. Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. the Peripheral organs of the Special senses the organs of Taste ( Peripheral gustatory or Medical Subject Headings ( MeSH) is a huge Controlled vocabulary (or metadata system for the purpose of indexing journal articles and books Elsevier, the world's largest Publisher of Medical and Scientific literature, forms part of the Reed Elsevier group The inner Ear is the bony labyrinth, a system of passages comprising two main functional parts the organ of hearing or Cochlea Mammals ( class Mammalia) are a class of Vertebrate Animals characterized by the presence of Sweat glands, including sweat glands Hair cells are the Sensory receptors of both the Auditory system and the Vestibular system in all Vertebrates. "

1 Structure and function
2 The discoverer: Alfonso Corti
3 Hearing loss
4 Additional images
5 Notes
6 References
7 External links

Structure and function

See also: Stereocilia (inner ear)

The organ of Corti has highly specialized structures that respond to fluid-borne vibrations in the cochlea with a shearing vector in the hairs of some cochlear hair cells. This page refers to the stereocilia of the ear For the stereocilia of the epididymis see Stereocilia (epididymis Stereocilia are mechanosensing The cochlea is the auditory portion of the Inner ear. Its core component is the Organ of Corti, the sensory organ of hearing, which is distributed along It contains between 15,000-20,000 auditory nerve receptors. Each receptor has its own hair cell. The shear on the hairs opens ion channels, leading to neural, electrical signaling to the auditory cortex. Ion channels are pore-forming Proteins that help establish and control the small Voltage Gradient across the Plasma membrane of all living The primary auditory cortex is the region of the Brain that is responsible for processing of auditory ( Sound) information The pinna and middle ear amplify sound levels, so that by the time these longitudinal waves reach the Organ of Corti, they are 20 times that of the levels impinging on the pinna. The pinna ( Latin for Feather) is the visible part of the Ear that resides outside of the head (this may also be referred to as the auricle or The middle ear is the portion of the ear internal to the Eardrum, and external to the Oval window of the Cochlea. This amplification is partly responsible for the delicacy of the Organ of Corti with respect to excessive sound levels, and helps to understand noise induced health effects. Noise health effects are the Health consequences of elevated Sound levels Elevated workplace or other Noise can cause Hearing impairment

The discoverer: Alfonso Corti

The organ was named after the Italian anatomist Marquis Alfonso Giacomo Gaspare Corti (1822-1876), who conducted microscopic research of the mammalian auditory system from 1849 to 1851 at the Koelliker laboratory in Würzburg, Germany. He developed new coloring techniques in microscopic anatomy, which enabled him to distinguish and describe individual components inside the highly complex cochlea that had previously been unidentified. In 1851 he was the first to describe the core sensory organ in the mammalian cochlea, the organ of Corti.

Hearing loss

Main article: Hearing impairment

The most common kind of hearing impairment, sensorineural hearing loss, includes as one major cause the reduction of function in the organ of Corti. Sensorineural hearing loss is a type of Hearing loss in which the root cause lies in the Vestibulocochlear nerve ( Cranial nerve VIII the inner Ear Specifically, the active amplification function of the outer hair cells is very sensitive to damage from exposure to trauma from overly-loud sounds or to certain "ototoxic" drugs. Hair cells are the Sensory receptors of both the Auditory system and the Vestibular system in all Vertebrates. Once outer hair cells are damaged, they do not regenerate, and the result is a loss of sensitivity and an abnormally large growth of loudness (known as recruitment) in the part of the spectrum that the damaged cells serve. ^[1]