[SkepticalDebunker (OP)]

I recently met someone who claimed that he was born lacking any inner ear function. He said that he is now in his 30s. When I inquired about his condition further, he said that the inner ear physically did not grow at all, so beyond the exterior ear parts, there's nothing actually inside.

I remember it being all over the news when the cause for SIDS was discovered. A team of researchers noticed that several people who had died suddenly in their sleep had hearing loss in their right ear. They then created a patent, which to the best of my memory was a device which measures the blood CO2 and O2 levels in people with loss of ear function, which would sound an alarm to the person and others around them if levels fell outside of the normal range.

They hypothesized that the inner ear hair cells are chemoreceptors and their purpose is to detect CO2 to drive autonomic breathing.

A few years later this team did a study on mice, which ended up confirming their hypothesis to a T - the mice with destroyed inner ear hair cells lost virtually all of their chemosensitivity wheras the mice whose ears were injected with saline (the controls) did not. This loss of chemosensitivity is observed with conditions such as Ondine's Curse. The team were interviewed in subsequent press releases, where they mentioned the inner ear hair cells being chemoreceptors important for breathing. I remember an audiology website picking this up and saying that these inner ear hair cells are "pivotal" for respiration and damage to them can cause loss of breathing function and death.

So, to me, this is like someone claiming they were born without lungs and survived into their 30's without significant medical intervention. Was someone pulling my leg here?

[Petrochemicals]

I would have thought balance would have been the bigger problem.

[paul cotter]

And hearing.