Dr. Konstantina Stankovic

They both sense vibration, and vibration is such a fundamental phenomenon.

If you think about it in terms of the universe, it's these vibrations that are everywhere around us, electromagnetic vibrations.

We're talking about sound vibrations, but now we can even convert these electromagnetic vibrations

vibrations from the depths of the universe to sound so that we can hear gravitational waves, which is really interesting.

So this idea of being able to detect vibration is very deeply fundamental.

And even bacteria can detect vibration.

They have those little flagella that allow them to move around.

And fish, for example, we talked about fish and other species that live in the seas and oceans.

They have this lateral line organ along their side that detects vibration.

And it's very similar to the sensory cells in the inner ear.

to the point that we sometimes use, for example, zebrafish as animal models because they are transparent, you can see through them, and you can literally see these hair cells in the lateral line organ and test for drugs that may be toxic to the ear, although they also have the ear.

So yes, there is this profound, deep connectedness, and in the human body,

auditory versus vestibular system, those cells look very similar.

We talked about inner versus outer hair cells in the auditory system.

Inner hair cells are flax-shaped, and outer hair cells are more like cylinder or cigar-shaped.

Similarly, in the vestibular system, there is type 1 and type 2 hair cells.

And they detect vibration at different frequencies.

The vestibular system is a lower frequency system compared to the auditory system.

But what's fascinating is that there are some data showing that even stimulation that's non-auditory can still be very impactful on auditory.

our functioning and perception.