I wish Bill Nye, the science guy, was here for a brief tutorial, but you'll have to settle for boring old me. The picture to the right is of a single hair cell. The cell has been pulled into a small glass pipette. The other glass pipette can blow water across the tuft of hairs to simulate an acoustic stimulus. So the sound wave is sent through the cochlea and eventually causes the hairs on the hair cells to move back and forth.
Some more stuff happens so that the cell eventually fires a nerve attached to it.
See the links below for greater detail. I began my postdoc with Paul Fuchs in the JHU Center for Hearing and Balance in July of 1999. More details to follow. Paul A. Fuchs Monsignor Bonner High School An otherwise lovable Cynthia turns loose on unsuspecting teenage boys at Monsignor Bonner High School, ramming seemingly useless biology facts done their choking throats. So when I didn't receive too many interviews from the public schools, I sent my resume to every catholic high school in the area.