The smallest muscle in the human body, instrumental to your wellbeing, and that you've probably never heard of, is the Stapedius. The Stapedius is a muscle in the middle ear that is about half a centimeter long. Tiny. Think of a grain of sushi rice.
It is situated in the middle ear, in the tympanic cavity that receives sounds through the ear drum, and transduces them mechanically through an articulated chain of bones into the cochlea. If you want to wax rhapsodic about the genius of the body, study the ear. Its strangeness is so deeply otherwordly as to simply engender awe.
Sounds from the world-at-large enter the outer ear and are funneled down the ear canal to your eardrum. The outer ear is the part you can touch, the part that makes contact with the outer world, the part that your parents are forever warning you not to stick things into, for fear that you will perforate your eardrum. The outer ear terminates in the eardrum, which, as you might guess from the inclusion of the word drum in its name, is a stretched membrane that is tensioned to receive sounds incoming from the outside world.
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