The sound of one hand clapping .... is the sound of your own ears.

 

Now, ask yourself what actually is intended by the word "ears"

 

An ear is not simply that flappy thing hung out to the breeze. that thing is only part of your ear - not a crucial part either. No one would mistake a television antenna for a television. The real ear is inside your head. The real ear is a matched set of auditory nerves, one per ear. So the question is .. what does an ear sound like? is the same as asking what does your auditory nerve sound like

.

We are accustomed to thinking that to listen means to listen to sounds produced by something outside ourselves. But the ten-billion nuerons in your central nervous system (CNS) are never "off". At all times a nonzero "electrical pressure"  - a so called resting voltage of approximatey seventy millivolts within the nueron - creates a continuous tendion across the entire cell. Therefore, the auditorry nerves inside your head are always listening ...

But how is it we can hear our auditory nerves? What would it mean even if we did? And wouldn't the sound be just static, random noise?

 

First off, don't confuse the sound of one hand clapping with an imagined sound, a sound one invents in the head. Such sounds are really a kind of auditory memory that can be summoned at will, like Beethoven who remembered the notes after going deaf. The sound of one hand clapping is definitely not memory. It is a real sound, though not necessarily a constant or unvarying sound. To understand how we can hear it, why in fact we can not avoid hearing it, reflect a moment on how it is you hear external sound.

 

An external sound is a pressure wave that travels through the air. The wave causes the air in contact with your eardrum to alternately to pile up thin out very rapidly. The percussive effect of the wave causes the membrane of the skin that is the eardrum to vibrate; thence, the vibration is transmitted to the middle ear, then to the internal ear. Finally, the auditory sensorium of your brain processes the signal so you can hear it. Along the way, the mechanical energy of the vibrating sound wave is converted into electrical pulses that travel through the nerve much as electrical signals travel along a transmission line.  Your body will modulate the vibration. Low pitches carry sufficent energy to vibrate the floor, your feet, your bones, your skull and the auditory nerve itselfe. Your experience of sound, then in uniquely dependent on the biophysics of your body.

 

Now the point is thus: your auditory nerves are not stimulated by external vibrations.

Your body itself is the source of many vibrations. Some such as heartbeat and respiration are regulars. Otherssuch as the mechanical vibrations frome eating, flexing, talking, are irregular. By definition, a stimulation of the auditory nerve is not a sound. It doesn't matter whether the stimulus originates in the eardrum or in the nerve itself.

 

The auditory nerve is a cranial nerve, that is, a nerve inside the skull. The cranial nerves are primarily electromagnetic (EM) entities. In the abstract, cranial nerves are a collection of waveguides: conduits for the passage of EM waves. Nerve bundles are surrounded by a delicate membranous sheath which attenuates any EM signal incident upon it. Our premise is that the ability to sense internal stimuli is indefinitely great, so we must assume that the sensoria are capable of detecting minute voltage changes within the nerves. Moreover, the auditory nerves are unusual among cranial nerves because they are not sheilded by a protective membrane that anatomists call the nuerilemma; they are thus presumably more sensitive to internal stimuli. Keeping in mind that any stimulation, external or internal, of the auditory nerves is a sound that can be heard by the brain. Internal sound  is an internal process that does not involve the drum of the ear. Such a process need not be electromagnetic ... many of the routine body functions stimulate the auditory nerves. Every time your heart contracts, the blood it pumps collides with the right angle of the aorta,. The collision sets up a complex of pressure waves that reaches the skull as a vibratory resonance of the cerebral ventricles, and the brain expands or contracts slightly in response.

But why limit the discussion to obvious physical stimuli such as respiration and heartbeat when there are subtler and certainly more intriguing stimuli to consider. Let us also assume that the mind is entirely physical - an old if controversial assumption. Nice distinctions between mind and matter become confudes when seen from within the material seat of the mind. In speaking of the physical brain then, we speak also of emotions and intellect. Emotional states are voltage changes recorded as brain waves on strip charts. Thoughts and even moral dilemmas are minute chemical and electrical processes. Your lifesytle, your emotions, your moral predicaments can be sensed in the physics of your brain. The auditory nerves hear these things too. And suddenly the sound of one hand clapping has become the sound of your own soul.