Within the Helix

The Face: A Natural History
By Daniel McNeill

(Page 11 of 12)

In 1731 a Spanish sailor, defending his nation's trading rights in Cuba, boarded an English brig and sliced off the ear of Captain Robert Jenkins. This impertinence outraged the captain, though it didn't alter his appearance, since he wore a wig like most other sailing officers. But he kept the ear, pickled it, and talked constantly about it. Seven years later, when relations with Spain had grown tense, Jenkins displayed it indignantly to Parliament. Public ire soared, and the government reluctantly declared war on Spain: the War of Jenkins' Ear.

As ears go, Jenkins's enjoyed a remarkable trajectory. The ear is normally a humble facial feature, inconspicuous and often buried in hair. In Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase (1989), the copywriter-narrator becomes fascinated by enormous photos of an ear in his office, "the quintessence, the paragon of ears." He feels the erotic pull of its whorls, and eventually seeks out and sleeps with the woman who bears them. But this is a whimsy, and the effect stems from its oddity. The ear is a facial outpost.

Hence big ears can strike us forcibly. The modest suddenly clamors for attention. Everyone's ears lengthen with age, but some stand out long before. The gangster who dominated Shanghai's drug trade in the twenties and thirties-and tutored a choleric thug named Chiang Kai-Shek-earned his sobriquet from his ears: Big-Eared Tu. The 45-foot Buddha in Cave 20 at Yungang, China, has epic ears that touch his shoulders. In the Mesopotamian Epic of Creation, godlike Marduk has four colossal ears (along with four eyes and a breath of fire).

Fish lack true ears. Rather, they have a lateral line system, which detects quivers in water. This apparatus can lie deep within, since fish are about as dense as water and vibrations travel right through them. But sound waves in air are too weak for the lateral line system, and when the first fish struggled onto land, they needed a way to sense them.

They developed both the eardrum and the hammer-anvil-stirrup system, which cleverly magnify air waves. (In a famously weird evolutionary move, the jawbones migrated upward to form these tiny structures.) The intensified signals reach the snail-shaped cochlea, where they cause the fluid inside it to vibrate. The cochlea has minute hairs sensitive to these pulses, and they send messages to the brain: sound. In a sense, we still hear underwater.

Land animals also sprouted a pinna, or ear flap. (We are so used to calling the ear flap the "ear" that "pinna" smacks of jargon, like calling the cheeks the "buccae." But the distinction can matter: Without pinnas we are lessened, but without ears we are deaf.) All primates possess pinnas, and land mammals without them are rare. Why have a pinna? Darwin deemed it useless. Cicero came closer. He thought it amplified sound, like the box of a violin, and it does, somewhat. But its main job is different.

The pinna helps locate sound. Its ridges and clefts bounce a few sound waves into the ear later than the rest, in a pattern that depends on their source. The brain then decodes it. Scien-

tists have filled subjects' pinnas with wax, and found they perceive sound as coming from inside the skull, as with head-phones. Some convolution of the pinna is essential, but extra amounts don't seem to improve performance.

We also locate sound through the fact that we have two ears, which create a kind of auditory parallax. Sound waves strike one ear slightly before the other, and the brain notes the difference.

Even so, we are fallible. We think movie voices come from the screen, and ventriloquists regularly fool us. The long-eared bat (Plecotus auritus) does much better. Its scooplike pinnas are longer than its body and enhance its echolocation, so this extraordinary creature can fly through scrub twigs at night and catch insects in rain. Like many animals, it can also move its pinnas to focus on sound. Among humans, the talent is rare, the stuff of classroom glory. We turn our heads instead.

In some animals, the pinna helps cool the body. The desert-dwelling jackrabbit has huge ears richly veined with blood vessels, which dissipate heat. The ears of elephants do the same. These great beasts are somewhat spherical, and hence must disperse more heat per square inch of skin. By flapping their fanlike ears, they speed the process. The snowshoe hare, on the other hand, has short ears, to minimize heat loss.

The ear has a special geography almost no one ever notices. The rim is called the helix, after a fancied resemblance to a coil, and it curves in over the pinna like a breaking wave. A second ridge abuts it halfway down: the antihelix. The antihelix swings up into a little plane and down into the lobe. While most of the ear is cartilage, the lobe is soft and fatty, just right for hanging ornament. The hollow near the ear canal is the concha, from the Latin for "shell."

And the little nub of flesh beside the ear is the tragus. What child hasn't fingered this curious flange and wondered what it does? In fact, it protects the ear canal. The name, Greek for "he-goat," stems from the hair on its inward side. It suggested a goat's beard to Rufus of Ephesus, a contemporary of Pliny and the first medical lexicographer, the man who christened the tragus as well as the helix and lobe.

Each person's ear patterns are unique-like his face, irises, fingerprints, handwriting, voiceprint, scent, and contours of facial heat emission. They thus offer the potential for identifying criminals. In one famous case, investigators compared photos of the ears of Anna Anderson with those of Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Czar Nicholas II, whom Anderson claimed to be. They found many similarities, but poor photo quality stymied a final identification, and they merely concluded that they couldn't rule Anderson out. DNA tests later revealed her imposture.

The best-known ear in literature probably belongs to Hamlet's father. Claudius killed him by pouring poison into it as he slept, a metaphor for pernicious advice, that specialty of Shakespeare's villains. And the best-known ear in history is not Jenkins's but Van Gogh's.* He sliced it off after an argument with Gauguin, wrapped it carefully in paper, and gave it to a prostitute in a nearby brothel, saying, "Here. In remembrance of me." Neither is as famous as Pinocchio's nose, and it shows how peripheral this feature is. The ear is a facial Connemara, nestled up against a wild sea of hair.

© 1998 by Daniel McNeill

About the Author

Daniel McNeill is a bestselling author and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for The Face. Mr. McNeill is the principal author of Fuzzy Logic, which won the 1992-93 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology. He has written numerous other books and articles on high technology, and his work has also appeared in fiction, travel, history, law, and education publications. He lives in Southern California.