[Music] when most of us think of our ears we really don't consider all the structures of the ear in fact we don't even consider all the regions of the ear we're really just most of the time thinking about our external ear but of course there's more to it than that this is a good place to start though and we'll work our way inward or medial from here so right here we have the helix then we have the anti-helix we have the tragus we have the antitragus and down here it's a little bit cut off here but this is where somebody may typically have their ears pierced this is called the lobule of the oracle so helix antihelix tragus antitragus and the lobule you've heard of your earlobes before that's where the word comes from the lobule of the oracle now if i take this instrument my little pointer that i have here and i poke it inside here what am i doing i'm putting my pointer here down the ear canal all right that ear canal is actually what we call the external acoustic meatus so if i take this piece off this is all part of our external ear again you can see helix anti-helix you can see the antitragus here and you can go right down the external acoustic meatus that's your ear canal and this is all external ear right to this point right here this structure right here let me remove a little bit more this structure right here if you look at it this is our eardrum we call the tympanic membrane if i put this back in place all the way up to the lateral side of this tympanic membrane this is all external ear everything i've described up to this point once we go to the medial side of this which is what you're seeing here now the medial side of this and you can actually see some of the bones we call these auditory ossicles some of the bones that we have here in fact this is malleus and incus we are now in the region of the middle ear so our middle ear is going to be right through here there's a tympanic membrane pardon me there's the tympanic membrane and there's the tympanic cavity that's the area where our auditory ossicles are and then we have this structure right here we call it the pharyngeal tympanic tube that's the tube that leads down to your nasal pharynx that's a region in the posterior or the back side of your nasal cavity so this connects essentially your nose to your ears this is all middle ear right here if i tilt this down a little bit let me hold this in place you can see where these auditory ossicles are malleus incus and stapes this is all middle ear now the stapes this is a bone that rests on another tiny little membrane again we have the tympanic membrane or your your eardrum that's one soft tissue we have another soft tissue right underneath here it's called the oval window once we pass to this side of the oval window we are now in the inner ear so again just for reference we have external ear that's from all the way to the outside to the tympanic membrane we have the middle ear that's the medial side of the tympanic membrane all the way down that pharyngeal tympanic tube all the way to the oval window and again it encompasses this tympanic cavity here but then from here in when i say in i mean medial this is where we now get to the structures of the inner ear and again if you look here you can see things like the semicircular canals you can see the cochlea and you can see cranial nerve number eight the vestibulocochlear nerve [Music]