tebop opened this issue on Jul 25, 2009 · 24 posts
ockham posted Sat, 25 July 2009 at 8:44 PM
Our internal hearing is distorted by a sort of self-protective mechanism.
Because the ears are only two inches away from the larynx, the sound is
extremely loud, somewhere around 130 dB. So the nervous system has
an automatic damper called the acoustic reflex. When sound gets above
a certain level, a little muscle pulls the eardrum inward and tightens the
three little bones after the eardrum, so that the whole system can't move
much when sound strikes it. This also changes the frequency pattern,
because the overall "wiggliness" of the system is changed.
(The internal version sounds lower in general.)
So your internally heard voice is considerably different from how others
hear it.