Free Special Senses Essay Sample

- You are at a park watching some children playing 25 feet away from you. Your friend taps you on the shoulder to ask a question. as you turn to look at your, who is standing 2 feet away, what changes will occur regarding the pupils, muscles and lenses of your eye? Explain.
For protection, the pupil will minimize light entering by reducing its size and for function the lens becomes rounder in order to have high refractive power ensuring the light coming from all directions bends enough to hit the back of the eye and produce an image. This occurs because the shorter distance means more light is coming in all directions thus light is converging to the eyes in contrast to further objects whose light is approaching the eye in a parallel manner.
- After attending a fourth of July firework extravaganza you find it difficult to hear normal conversations and your ear keep ringing. What is the causing your hearing problem? Explain.
The difficulty in hearing and tinnitus was caused from the loud noise coming from the fireworks. To protect the ear from damage, there will be a temporary threshold shift (TTS). What happens during exposure to loud sounds is that outer hair cells are damaged since their main function is to capture by gentler sounds and thus are affected more. By “turning off” the outer hair cells, they are given time to repair themselves and let the inner hair cells whose primary function is to capture loud sounds do their work.
- Astronauts living in a space vehicle eat much of their food directly from sealed pouches. They complain that such food taste bland, explain why.
This may be due to space adaptation syndrome (SAS) nasal congestion. The loss of gravity disrupts our body fluid distribution. Normally large volume of fluids from our legs stays there due to gravity. In microgravity however there is no more force to keep this volume gradient, so the fluid goes upward in order to be evenly distributed throughout the body. This supplies the head with more fluids than it can actually handle causing nasal congestion which in turn disrupts our sense of smell which works in tandem with our taste buds to provide necessary information to assess the flavor of what we are eating thus decreasing an astronaut’s sense of taste while in space.