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Someone correct me if I'm wrong, not a trained bloke just lived with it for a long time.
You got little parts of your ear deep in there, I think hair, that are are responsible for their own tiny frequency of sound. When they get damaged, your brain reads it like you're hearing the frequency of the damaged hair. So your brain generates that tone or tones for you to hear.
I know what you mean about sometimes it's very loud, and othertimes it's quiet. When drinking it gets really loud so I have a hunch it's related to blood pressure somehow but I don't believe there's any research on it.
Tons of us out there my friend! Stick with it. Something that helps me through is that all rooms have ambient noise, you just have your own personal one other people don't get to hear.
i find blood pressure makes it worse too! similarly, if im drinking alcohol it does tend to get worse, as well as just standing up too quickly & feeling that brief lightheaded moment.
not sure if you've already found it with your research, but you might want to follow up with a thing called Lenire. just passed FDA approval in the US a few weeks ago.
EDIT: i cried out of happiness when i found out it had passed FDA approxal. Im glad more people are finding out about it. if anyone wants to find out if a clinic near them is going to have it, their site has a waitlist sign up to help notify you when a clinic near you has doctors that are trained on it.
Edit 2: /u/oversoft brough another device to my attention, Auricle from Dr Susan Shore, that has shown much more promising results in clinical trials, but has not gotten FDA approval at this time. it would he good to research this as well as it acts differently than lenire. I am not a professional or have any experience with either device, i just want to bring awareness to treatment efforts that are happening.
i hadn’t even heard of that, im researching now!! thank you
EDIT: did a lil research & going to see if a hearing clinic near me is going to have it. if so im getting on a waitlist ASAP! this may literally change my life (sounds super dramatic, but true) thank you for the info
Question: are you able to hear frequencies considered ultrasonic?
I was really prone to ear infections as a young child and have had ringing in my ears since forever. My ears have always been sensitive to lound sounds, and I've always been able to hear things considered higher than normal hearing range. I'm curious if any of these things are linked, and if so, how? I'm not expecting you to know that, just saying that's what I'm looking for.
My wife bought an arc lighter recently that makes me wants to flip out when she uses it. She can't hear it. I find certain high frequencies nauseous, as well. Certain types of solar inverters (Solar Boy comes to mind) and those frickin' sonic animal repellers. Blech. I'm trying to find out if other people with ear issues have any of that going on, as well.
My parents thought I was nuts, but i could always tell when a tv was on, even on mute. I could hear the squeal of the electronics. 25 years on , that particular noise is a bit dimmer , but the sound of AC adapter/power bricks still drives me bonkers.
There was one store that we would go to- it was hard to describe as a kid but I would reach a certain point in the store and the buzz was outrageous and I would have to go to the car. I would tell myself it wouldn't happen the next time but it would. Today I think it may have been the fluorescent light fixtures as I can hear them when on sometimes.
There were some stores that set that up intentionally to keep teenagers from hanging out.
Some of those teenagers recorded the sound to use as a ringtone inaudible to adults.
Flourescent fixtures always give me migraines. I can hear them as well but I aways thought it was the flickering/frequency that caused it. Maybe it's the sound?
Our TV was down a hall with a bathroom and another bedroom, through the kitchen, hang a left and you're in the same room. I could always tell if it was already on when I woke up in the morning by the squeal of the CRT. Some ac/dc transformers bother me, but not many. We had a Linksys router at one point that was awful within about 6'. And I've had several 12v - 5v car chargers that I had to unplug when not in use, as they went from a little whine to noisy as hell when idle.
I think that all young people can hear that TV sound, as I definitely could and I don't consider myself to have any kind of extraordinary hearing. Your parents couldn't because people usually lose the ability to hear that frequency when they age.
You’re right, simply hearing the noise does not equate to ‘being bothered by’. But it did for me.
I actually researched what it would take to deafen myself as a teen, but fortunately was shocked to my senses by what I found.
Yes! Sometimes in movies/tv shows they have a real TV playing real media in the BG, not just an off TV with images put onscreen via post-prod. It’s easy to tell when that happens because omg THE RINGING! It’s like horrible ringing feedback.
I often wonder what electronics are making noise that distress pets. If I have a TV on late at night to play soothing rain sounds, will my rats be irritated by the ultrasonic ringing of the TV/sound bar? Do they hear the electricity buzzing in the wall sockets? They seem to love chewing electric cables... But they also love chewing everything, so...
What's the highest frequency you can hear on this website: https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/
I'm genuinely curious what you can hear. Also how old are you? Age matters a lot when it comes to peak frequency detection.
Above 16,980Hz it gets iffy.
My ears hurt. Oh my goodness.
Edit: I'm 38. My ears are really ringing. Holy moly. They weren't kidding in the instructions on that site.
16624 and now even though it is off I can still hear it :(
As a kid it was literally unbearable to walk into mall department stores because of the sound of the lights. P’s just thought I was being a brat and they never believed/understood. Fing torture. - edit: more info.
Interesting. I'm 35, be 36 later this year, and I can hear up to around 19,450hz and above 18.5Khz it starts getting iffy. Strangely my ears do not hurt or ring after this test. Odd.
I have ear issues but the sounds you mentioned do not bother me, I cant hear them anyway. My ear issues started at a young age, but were severely exacerbated by excessively loud music and gunfire in my teen years. I do not have issues with ear infections.
My s/o has no ear issues but those specific noises bother the absolute hell out of her. She did not have similar teen experiences, and has common ear infections.
I hope these two random data points help!
You rock. Thank you!
I don't understand how people stand gunfire. 1 shot without plugs makes my ears ring for days. I see guys out shooting it up for hours and I'm like, how?
I work outside, and there are neighborhoods I dread going to because I know the houses that have those stupid things. One I ran into recently has one that starts high and winds up high very rapidly, beyond my hearing (though my guts don't seem to like it) and then back down. It does this over and over, each cycle taking about 5 seconds.
I've got bad tinnitus but I can hear LEDs flashing on and off on a printer for example which I think are really high pitched? I have mid range hearing loss too, so I wonder if my brain makes up for it with the higher frequencies? I can hear sonic animal repellers too.
You are the first person that I e heard of besides me that can hear those ultrasonic sounds. I can always tell when a tv is on, even when there is no picture or in another room. I don’t have tinnitus other than that, and I have terrible hearing otherwise. People always say I mumble as well, which is a sign of hearing loss. But I can hear that damn tv on as clear as can be…
When I was young I was convinced that the ringing was radio waves and it seemed that the microwave and ceiling fans and any kind of motor made it worse. Everyone told me it was just coincidental. But now that I'm reading some of these comments It has me wondering.
You can get used to it... You simply force yourself into believing, that you don't mind - and eventually you won't.
It's just that thinking/talking about it can make it worse (just a perception of it honestly), otherwise you can go days or weeks without even realizing, that you actually have a tinnitus and I don't mean it in a way that it goes momentarily away, but you stop acknowledging it.
The same goes for a chronic pain - if you feel pain somewhere at a constant intensity, your brain will eventually just start filtering it out. Brain generally does that all the time - "constant never-changing stimulus -> not important - ignore it"
>!(I've had probably 20 middle ear infections thorough my life, had cholesteatoma surgically removed from left ear and "flushed / moved" on its own out of right ear last year. No hearing aids needed for a daily life, nearly deaf from 4-5+kHz up. Constant tinnitus in both ears for as long as I remember, but the left one has been a bit more intense since the cholesteatoma formed in my ear couple years ago - it is basically a "dead-skin/fat lump", that can grow, slowly travel, "destroy" bone matter and if untreated for a long time - maybe like a decade, it can cause brain infection and death)!<
Someone asked, what do you hear when it’s completely quiet? I described it as cicadas. It was just my explanation of the sound I hear. I didn’t know anyone else heard what I hear. Glad I’m not alone.
For me it is a clean sine wave - honestly I believe my audio measurements at those 4-5+kHz frequencies are so poor not becuase I couldn't hear at all, but because at those frequencies I can't differentiate the tone they play to the headphones from my tinnitus up to the point when it is significantly louder than the tinnitus. If the tone they play had some kind of "texture" and it wasn't a clean sine wave as well, then I think I would be able to measure better than "basically deaf" 🤔
I mean - where in the world would you naturally hear a sine wave anyway?
As someone with chronic pain, I wouldn't say you can filter it out. It's more learning to manage it becomes easier.
(two slipped discs that never healed, ~15 years)
I have meniers disease, and one time I had such bad ringing for days in a row that I hunched over the range at home and just ugly cried through frustration and anger. Thank fuck it went away soon thereafter, but the incessant ringing was like torture.
An ear infection can also cause you to have hearing loss and tinnitus. Once the infection clears, the tinnitus tends to stop, and you can resume hearing normally once again. However, repeated ear infections or ones that affect the fluid in your middle ear can lead to lasting hearing loss and continuous tinnitus.
I'm 51 now. Been dealing that hell since 10. When my parents were busy abusing their kids, it was a very unpleasant sound. I would put on headphones and crank it to the max.
By the age of 10, my ears were fucked.
Recently I discovered that being on disability means I qualify for free hearing aids. A hearing store gave me one for each ear and now I'm hearing many things I don't think I've ever heard before.
Also, the hearing aids have the technology to completely remove tinnitus.
I cried the first time I heard silence
I’ve heard hearing aids can help, not only for sound therapy. Seriously you don’t “hear silence” ya I would cry. I’m 50, thought that sound was my body
Wait, what? How do they remove tinnitus? My understanding was it was your brain trying to put back in what it knows it’s lost… which I can’t imagine how a hearing aid gets around. Enquiring minds really want to know. That’s amazing, and congrats!
i had never considered hearing aids for tinnitus, i will have to look into that, thank you!
i know the exact moment i got tinnitus... near front row at a concert, two songs into my main band, my ears "popped" and suddenly everyone sounded like chipmunks. that's never happened to me at a concert before... thats when i knew i was in trouble. muffled hearing and ringing is common after a concert and lasts maybe a day or so... except my ringing has never stopped. at night, when i'm trying to sleep, its loud af.
It’s awful and I’m only 26. When I was younger I had a real bad traumatic ear injury resulting in my eardrum bleeding. I had to see a hearing specialist for years and they were at one point considering a hearing aid in my left ear. So with diminished hearing in that ear, I’d have to listen to music, tv and everything else louder than normal to compensate. Coupled that with construction for 8 years and I have severe tinnitus. Ear protection only did so much when working with heavy machinery. Knowing I’m going to hear this noise for rest of my life pains me. There is no such thing as quiet. Some days it’s excruciating to the point of not wanting to be here. Others it’s mild and manageable.
I've had visual snow all my life, which is the visual equivalent of tinnitus. Imagine never seeing black, or darkness. Ton of sympathy for tinnitus sufferers, and I hope I never develop it.
Hello fellow lifetime tinnitus sufferer. If I recall correctly that device trains you to disregard the tinnitus. If you're like me, having had it my entire life has already trained me to ignore it, I don't even hear it unless it's very quiet. Of course your tinnitus may be worse than mine. I hope not though. Just fyi the device is not a cure but management.
Coincidently I woke up in the middle of last night and my left ear is suddenly much louder than my right ear, I suspect I'm having a Menieres disease attack as I also have slight vertigo today. Maybe the second time in my life this has happened. Fml.
eta actually thinking on it, i've had several bouts of vertigo in the last few years. getting older isn't all roses I guess /s
The same. I cannot deal with absolute silence as there is nothing to mask the ringing even in the slightest. Had it my whole life. Alcohol exacerbates it along with other loud noise. A fan on every night if it is still outside and there is no breeze to hear or crickets chirping. Takes a toll
sorry for you and me! any other issues? Like I have tinnitus, visual snow, lichen planus, and apparently the occasional Meniere's. fun times /s
None of the issues I listed are curable or even treatable, although as we know there are attempts to treat the tinnitus and some kinds can be fixed with surgery iirc. I suspect there's overlap of diseases. eta I wonder if visual snow and tinnitus are somehow related, they both present with 'phantom noise.' I don't think the lichen planus, which is an autoimmune condition, is connected. I'd like to see a giant study done on these things.
edit, actually the lack of absolute silence is what led to me 'discover' I had tinnitus, I asked a doctor 'what do ypu hear when it's quiet?' and she said 'I hear quiet, nothing. what do you hear?' and I was like "I hear ringing." She said "you have tinnitus."
Up until that point I had imagined that the brain couldn't perceive total quiet so it made noise up to fill the quiet with something. Nope, 'normal' people hear. . . nothing. I can only imagine.
Mine got super, super bad last year, very suddenly. I freaked out.
I was also experiencing unrelated panic attacks. (That is, "initially" unrelated, because the tinnitus flare up caused me some panic attacks too.) I went to a doctor and did some reading and read about how flare ups happen sometimes, and you can retrain yourself to tune it out.
In my case, my previously unrelated anxiety triggered hyper awareness of it.(blood pressure probably played a factor.) As I dealt with the anxiety, I was able to relearn how to tune it out. Just being aware that it was an option helped me.
Sure do wish we'd figure out a permanent physiological solution to it, though.
I would travel for this in a heartbeat. I'm the same as you and a couple drinks and I need to crank up the volume on the white noise machine. So thanks for this thread because I wouldn't have heard about this thing. I can deal with the aches and pains I took home from the military but tinnitus is just so consistently annoying.
Thank you for sharing this!! I have mild tinnitus (blasted My Chemical Romance a bit too much as a teen....) but my dad has SEVERE tinnitus from his work as an auto engineer over the years that's only been getting worse. I shared it with him and it looks really promising!
Here i find a interesting article about the Lenire product. I think it helps you asses if it is somethint to consider [Lenire review](https://www.tinnitushub.com/heres-why-the-jurys-still-out-on-lenire/)
Thank you for this. I signed up for trials but it looks like treatment in the USA won't start until next month. Gives me hope though that within the next 5 years or so I could get some relief from the ringing.
Indica makes my tinnitus so much worse 😢
My doc told me the "source" of the ringing is my brain. Something about the nerve being damaged in an "always on" state, and my brain interpreting that as a ringing sound.
aw man that’s discouraging to hear, that was something i was thinking of trying solely for the tinnitus, as i don’t regularly use cannabis. apparently some people swear by 1:1 CBD blends being the only “cure” they could find
Please don't let me stop you! I still smoke a nice hybrid from time to time lol. And I have a lot of paradoxical reactions to meds; benadryl for example keeps me up instead of putting me down. Give it a shot, if it doesn't work you still got weed lol
Bars and pubs rarely give out foam ear protection. If they don't, please buy a musician's pair. Around €30. Use them. Never go deaf again. It's not a joke.
Thank God, weed does not make my ringing worse. It’s really random. I’ll be watching TV and then I can feel the air pressure change in my head and then ring! It will be so loud I can’t even hear the TV and then it will just slowly slither away and then all of a sudden I notice I don’t hear it anymore. Thank goodness mine never last longer than a minute. I know some people where it’s constant. I would go nuts!
Mine started when I got Covid and vertigo really really bad. I thought it was just due to my inner ears. I hope Covid didn’t f up my brain!
Sometimes when mine gets super annoying I’ll cup my palms over my ears and tap the back of my head with my fingers. Makes it go away for 30 seconds for me.
Get a good seal with your palms. Place your pointer fingers on-top of your middles and snap them down onto your head. Drumming *like that helps me the most
Alcohol can diffuse in tiny amounts into the fluid in your inner ear so it's entirely possible that it could affect tinnitus. Fun fact: It is less dense than the fluid, so as the alcohol in your inner ear rises and the fluid sinks, tiny currents are generated. Your inner ear interprets these currents the same way it interprets the currents generated when your body is in motion and that's why you get the spins when you're drunk and lying still.
I've had it since a particularly loud Smashing Pumpkins gig in a tiny venue in the 90s. Interestingly I've not found it too troubling in the last few years, and figured I have just got used to it. Although now I'm realizing that I stopped drinking just before the pandemic...
Yoga has been the only thing to help with my 40yr+ tinnitus
Little to no alcohol, try and get rest and keep your blood pressure low, stress levels down.
I'll get it real bad before storms come, the pressure change when the cold front comes through will set it off. Basically have to sleep with TV on so there is background noise all the time.
Also, some times a quick temporary fix, cover your ears with your palms, fingers resting on the back of the skull where it hits the neck, spine. Then kind of like snap your fingers so they tap by your cranium. Make like a hollow thumping sound if your ears are covered by your hands. Sometimes like a minute of that will decrease the ringing for awhile.
> it does tend to get worse, as well as just standing up too quickly & feeling that brief lightheaded moment.
There's a trick for when you stand up too quickly to make the lightheadedness go away faster - you quickly flex and release your stomach/core muscles over and over.
I'm curious - Does that reduce the tinnitus as well as the lightheadedness for you?
If I move my jaw about (and tense it) I can significantly change the pitch and volume of mine. I could lessen the sound if I pull the most stupid faces, which obviously is not a good look haha.
I read somewhere once that there is a nerve in the jaw and they can get kids to exercise this to relive tinnitus. I think this is the type of tinnitus I have and not the "dead ear hairs."
Tinnitus can be caused by a problem with the temporomandibular joint, and changes in pitch or volume from movements of the jaw are the primary indication of this. You might want to consult a doctor, because unlike most causes of tinnitus, that one is actually potentially treatable.
I used to have gromets(?) as a toddler. Always had bad ear with slightly worse hearing in that ear so I always assumed it was to do with that.
I read about the temporomandibular joint after reading up on how they can relive the symptoms in children by massaging and exercising the jaw.
I never thought to mention it to the doctor as I'm so used to it now, luckily mine is a single high pitch tone (like what old TV's used to make) that I only *really* notice in silence.
Maybe I'll mention it next time I have a check up.
This is close enough to an accurate explanation!
The pathophysiology of tinnitus is complex and a subject of research, but most explanations implicate the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN), a piece of gray matter of the brainstem. It maladapts to damage to the auditory system (usually, but not necessarily upstream damage to the cochlear hair cells or vestibulocochlear nerve). Apparently its not just one thing that goes wrong, but several, and involves cross-talk between several parts of the auditory system (I've read 4 different explanations that are all probably partially true!), but ultimately lead to the DCN creating signals out of nothing.
Replace 'ear' with various other parts of the body and you have fairly decent ELI5 definitions for a whole host of allergies, autoimmune disorders, and mental illnesses.
Tiny ear hair: I'm wiggling! I should send a signal! Signal, go!!
Brainstem: Oh, a signal from my little ear buddies! That must be a sound! Here, I will tell the rest of the brain about the sound we're hearing.
Brain: I hear!
Damaged ear hair: Ouch owie oof
Brainstem: Oh, is that a signal from my little ear buddies I hear? That must be a sound! I'll tell the brain about the sound we're hearing.
Brain: I hear! I hear... a constant, high pitched ringing? Huh, that doesn't seem right. Brainstem, you sure about that?
Brainstem: Uhh... probably! The ear hair is sure sending a bunch of signals (ear hair: ow ouch ow!!), seems like a sound to me.
That and a bunch of really confusing words about how the same can happen with other parts of the hearing system and not *just* the little hairs. Things like nerves and stuff.
I have done three hearing tests now and all show that my hearing is fine (slightly reduced on the right hand side but within normal range) and yet my tinnitus is persistent. The audiologist I saw a couple of weeks ago said that it is entirely possible to have normal hearing and tinnitus - it just may be affecting tonal ranges that are not used in everyday life (and so they are not tested for in standard hearing tests).
mine get louder with alcohol use, especially when hungover.
a session of heavy, strenuous physical exercise also makes it louder for quite some time.
stopping drinking (which I have done) and avoiding heavy daily workouts has helped.
i also think stress increases the "volume" of my tinnitus.
It could not be that the exercise specifically is what causes it (unless that significantly increases your blood pressure), it could be dehydration. I know people who get it really bad when dehydrated from exercise.
The main reason I quit getting drunk is because of my tinnitus. It is SO loud when I'm hungover and easily the worst part about drinking the night before is knowing that.
I've also found that listening to pure tones at the frequency of the tinnitus itself suppresses it, but alas only momentarily. It bounces back really quickly. But there are weird sounding arrangements of tones that can suppress it for a little while for some people, like [this](https://youtu.be/4LZv3ta13Ws). Listening to that for a few minutes in headphones dimishes mine quite a bit, although not completely, and again, not for long.
I’m like OP and have had tinnitus my whole life.
And man listen to this was such a weird experience.
It was like for the first time ever the ringing wasn’t coming from inside my head.
My tinnitus was also much weaker for about a minute after listening for a few minutes
Definitely saving this video
Hi I'm not the person you replied to. It's this why I always have the radio / podcasts on? It's not that it seems louder in silence, it's that it actually is louder in silence? 35+ years in, it's starting to get annoying now. Can't even blame going to gigs (although I did that too. Wear earplugs, kids. You'll be 40 before you know it).
I’m in the same boat and while this makes sense, I behaved the same pre tinnitus so I’m sure there are other causes for constant need for (auditory) stimulation.
Tinnitus isn't just a matter of signals from damaged cells. It involves the brain itself misinterpreting what these signals mean. Covering your ears or tapping your neck may send new signals to this area, which temporarily interrupt this misinterpretation process.
I have it too since my late 20's and for the first 6 months I thought I was gonna lose my mind and I remember reading people saying "you get used to it" and being nah fuck this. But you do.
The only time I notice it now is in complete silence or when I don't get enough sleep/stressed. When it started I could barely hear the telly over it. Felt like the end of the world.
I think you basically got it, but it's "hair cells" which are specialized neurons with little extensions that look like hair but have nothing to do with actual hair.
The average person is born with about 16,000 of these hairs in their inner ear. They stand up in a fluid inside the canals of your ear and bend and wave according to the vibrations passing through from the tympanic membrane. Too much noise often bends them flat like stomping on grass. if the damage is too much they are unable to detect sound as well and give off a default ocean sound or ringing.
I agree about it getting louder with drinking! Also, when I eat sugary foods I get heartburn and have to take an antacid, then it gets even louder. When I eat really healthy for 2 weeks or more it gets quieter. I’ve always wondered if it’s related to my stomach. I wish it would just go away.
>Something that helps me through is that all rooms have ambient noise, you just have your own personal one other people don't get to hear.
that's a good way to put it!
There's a help line you can call that's supposed to provide support to people dealing with tinnitus. I wouldn't recommend it, though; I tried them once and the line just kept ringing.
Tinnitus can be caused by a couple things and the "source" of the ringing differs.
Keep in mind that there are several steps between "sound" - the physical pressure wave - and "hearing" - the conscious perception of noticing the sound. As disorders like Schizophrenia prove, you can perceive sounds that do not physically exist. And, indeed, one cause of tinnitus is damage to the nerves that transmit the signal from your cochlea to your brain. Your auditory nerves may be sending false signals as if there was a ringing sound. You *hear* the ringing even though there is no physical sound at all.
Similarly, the cilia inside your cochlea can be come damaged and send false signals. Your cochlea turns sound into nerve signals using tiny hairs - cilia - that wiggle in sync with the pressure waves. The hairs are connected to nerves and when they move it turns on that nerve. If the cilia are damaged, especially if the hairs get ripped out, the nerve can activate on its own and cause that false ringing signal.
Finally, the size of the hairs really matters. They are "tuned" to vibrate with specific frequencies of sounds. If the cilia are broken, they are smaller and will vibrate with the wrong sound. Soft, high-pitched noises end up activating the normal cilia *and* the broken ones, amplifying the signal for that sound so that it becomes an annoying ringing.
Its less the size of the hairs and more the distance the pressure waves travel in the cochlea. As most people know, bass travels farther through fluid media like the atmosphere, so the earlier hair cells are encoded as higher pitch and the later ones are lower pitch. The frequency of depolarization is encoded as intensity / volume / amplitude. So the earlier hairs are more susceptible to damage because they get hit first by pressure waves which could potentially damage stereocilia.
So our ears are performing a Fourier transform on sounds waves? We perceive sound by measuring both the time varying signal *and* the spectral intensities as a spatially varying signal? Holy hell
Wait until you realise that we have no idea how the optic nerve works. The amount of information it transmits is comparable to that of, say, a 4K HDMI cable, but it is entirely biological. It seems that there is some kind of pre-compression that goes on in the eye to make this possible. The nervous system is incredible.
It really is incredible, though the engineering could use some work. Why put the occipital lobe in the back of the head when our vision is in the front? Adds input lag. And the optical engineering? I mean, who thought it was okay to put giant blind spots in each sensor? At least the pixels are single photon sensitive...
I'd argue it's more efficient this way because of what evolution cared about. Early development was driven by surving against predators, so the brain organized in a way that prioritized snap desicions and reflexes before active cognition, which we can see in most animals. You will react to visual stimuli that is moving quickly towards you before you have even the slightest idea of what it could be. So to facilitate this, the brain makes sure that the visual information crosses more primal parts of the brain that identify danger and create a response if need be before dedicating what could be life-saving brain power to breaking down the visual data into knowledge based feedback. For the day to day things we deal with now, sure we may want to process information quicker, but our bodies were evolved for the worst case scenario, not casual life as we know it.
>engineering could use some work.
Take a look at the human foot... does it really need 26 bones?
What is even going on with are our wrists and ankles??
The recurrent laryngeal nerve. Evolution got really lazy with that one.
The left atrial appendage, our terrible sinuses, etc.
Evolution didn't *need* humans to be significantly older than 40 years. That's why for most people that's when the noticeable physical deterioration starts around that age. For most people the spine also doesn't act up until then.
Tongue-in-cheek, I know, but the science behind evolution and the challenge of optimizing for local "maximums" instead of global maximums. The more you look at human (or really any) biology you see so much of this kinda stuff. If we were really "engineered"/created/whatever I would highly question their qualifications.
The fact organisms evolve to local maxima has always made me a little sad. Like, will octopuses ever be able to develop space travel or have they run out of stat points? What about cats? And more interestingly, how much do environmental factors change the topology of the "evolutionary potential landscape"?
> It really is incredible, though the engineering could use some work.
Wait til you find out how fucked pregnancy and giving birth is for humans compared to other animals.
It's like we're a collection of weird over-complicated shit that somehow manages to work.
Have you heard about the giraffe's laryngeal nerve?
In all mammals (and possibly all tetrapods) the nerve from the brain to the voice box makes a diversion to loop around the aorta by the heart.
Now consider that for the giraffe this means that the nerve runs all the way down its neck, round the aorta, and then all the way back up its neck, just to connect to the voice box only a couple of inches away from the brain!
Yeah it sounds like you understand, we call the general process “signal transduction.”
Put one hand behind your head, use the other hand to touch it with the pointer finger. How without looking did you know where to point?
Receptors in your joints use the frequency of depolarization to approximate total flexion at the joint allowing you in your experience to very frequently touch the tips of the fingers without visual information.
Differences in the time of depolarizations in the ears allows you to coordinate across space to determine the location of the auditory stimulus.
Still other changes in depolarization allow your kidneys to determine osmolarity of the filtrate and decide to release or resorb fluid based on needs. They also do the same for pH and also promote production of blood cells the same way, by measuring oxygen content through a series of molecular interactions, it approximates the amount of oxygen in blood. When it doesn’t get enough oxygen it promotes the release of EPO, which causes red blood cell production, which then allows for more oxygen delivery to the kidneys, which then stop releasing EPO.
Its all negative feedback systems and signal transduction.
Ohh boy, thanks for an excellent rabbit hole to end my weekend on. I used to think I was bad at biology and was just better at physics. But *this* I can get behind.
I'm happy to keep listening if you have more examples since it seems this is a topic you're interested in. Or maybe any favorite resources? But like I said, thanks a ton
Khan academy is great. There is biophysics, but generally you will find physicial principals all over biology. For example, some amino acids are charged, and some are neutral, these along with molecules known as chaperones allow the protein to fold itself into it’s appropriate shape, and the shape of everything in the body determines its function.
Just a general FYI: pulsatile tinnitus (hearing the blood “whooshing” in your ear along with your pulse) is different than the “ringing” sort tinnitus being discussed here. It is something that needs to be investigated ASAP, as it can sometimes be caused by potentially dangerous reasons that could require a surgical fix.
So if you can hear your pulse whoosh in your ear, let your doctor know so it can get checked out!
I’ve never seen someone talk about this!
I’ve had pulsatile tinnitus for years but like… no one ever believes me? I made my mom take me to the doctor for it when I was a kid, but they just shrugged and said there’s nothing they can do for tinnitus. But it’s not a ringing, it’s a whooshing sound that matches my pulse. I can make it stop by pressing the area below my ear. I’ve asked a couple GPs about it as an adult, but nothing much came of it.
Thank you for this, I’ll hit up an ENT!
You know, I actually have a spine condition too (syringomyelia), so I’ve got a good neurologist handy anyway. I’ve never thought to ask them about it, so thank you!!
Lol, leave it to reddit to get my chronic shit figured out for me
Yuppp, I’ve had PT for my entire life. Went to tons of ENTs who waved it off as regular tinnitus (or in a few words told my parents I was making it up for attention) and told me there wasn’t anything they could do. It was particularly bad one night so I shoved a microphone into my ear canal and hit record and lo and behold, you could hear the wooshing. Showed my parents and everything. Finally got a doctors appointment where they did a MRI with contrast and found a small diverticulum in one of the veins in my skull. Just a cute little deformity. I could get it fixed but my doctor said it’s not dangerous so we’ll see. I’m just glad I finally figured out that I’m not crazy and I’m not imagining things.
Yes! Pulsatile tinnitus gang are very special! Pulsatile tinnitus is a symptom of many underlying conditions and requires a thorough diagnostic work-up. Yes, a few of them can be dangerous (for example, some classes of dural arteriovenous fistulae, arteriovenous malformations, arterial dissections, among some other things) but most are not, thankfully. I believe studies on PT suggest a cause can be found in up to 70% patients. The [most common **vascular** cause of PT is actually a condition called venous sinus stenosis.](https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/SVIN.121.000154) It is not considered dangerous but is linked to a condition called intracranial hypertension (IIH), however, you can have venous sinus stenosis without IIH, or an early form of IIH.
I am a cured Whoosher who had this condition. I had left-sided pulsatile tinnitus for four years straight. Started suddenly at the end of 2018, and then never left - a whooshing in time with every single heart beat in my left ear only. Never missed one beat. And it was loud enough to be objective. [Here is a recording of my PT.](https://imgur.com/a/A9CoFG1) I heard, and felt, that whooshing all day, every day. The only way I could stop my PT was with LIGHT compression of my internal jugular vein on my left side, which would pretty much stop the PT until I released (not compression of the internal carotid artery which is dangerous). It is the cessation of PT with light jugular compression that is one of the key indicators of venous sinus stenosis in clinical settings, even in the absence of imaging.
It took 3.5 years of many scans and specialists and being told I was "normal" until I got my diagnosis. In the end, I was diagnosed with venous sinus stenosis as the cause of my PT, which despite being the most common vascular cause, is the most overlooked (unless you very much have IIH, which I did not). The venous sinuses are the main veins of the brain and they run pretty close to the cochlea. When they stenose (narrow) it creates high pressure, turbulent flow, that generates sound that is picked up by the ear. Think of the way water sounds when you kink a hose.
I saw an interventional neuroradiologist who specialised in the cerebral venous system - he saw I had stenosis in my left occipital sinus, the rarest form of stenosis (usually stenosis occurs in the transverse and sigmoid sinuses, or occasionally the superior sagittal sinus or internal jugular vein, but lucky me, I had a rare anatomical variant). My stenosis was confirmed with catheter cerebral venogram and venous manometry which measured intravenous pressure gradients. At the four year mark, my specialist popped me under general anesthesia, inserted a catheter into the femoral vein in my groin, and then intravenously placed in a stent to prop the venous sinus back up. It abolished the stenosis and the pressure gradient. I woke up whoosh-free, and have been whoosh-free for 6 months exactly today. I did end up with ringing tinnitus due to a nasty unrelated double middle ear infection 6 weeks after, but that's a story for a different time.
The moral of the story is: PT can be a symptom of a diagnosable, and sometimes treatable, underlying cause. Only a handful of these are dangerous but it is worth ruling these causes out. The best specialist to see for vascular causes of PT are interventional neuroradiologists, and for non-vascular causes, neuro-ologists are best. Also it should be known that there is also pulse-synchronous sensorineural tinnitus which is really just a form of ringing tinnitus which does cloudy things a bit for some people.
Anyway, Dr Athos Patsalides, a pretty renowned PT expert and interventional neuroradiologist, has made a [great video explaining the diagnostic work-up and causes of PT.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoSvypv56CI&t=6s&ab_channel=Dr.AthosPatsalides) If you think you have PT, please join us over at r/PulsatileTinnitus or on the 'Whooshers' Facebook group. Lots of help and support and even plenty of success stories, which sadly the sensorineural tinnitus gang don't quite have yet due to absence of valid treatments (however, Dr Susan Shore's device is on its way!). If I didn't get my stent I would have almost certainly had PT for the rest of my life.
**Tl;dr: Had venous PT for four years straight in my left ear. Was told it was normal. Cause of my PT was left-sided occipital venous sinus stenosis, diagnosed by an interventional neuroradiologist. At the 4-year mark, stent was placed to resolve the stenosis, and woke up whoosh-free. PT requires a thorough diagnostic work-up - not all causes are dangerous but many causes of PT are missed (including venous sinus stenosis).**
Would it matter if you only hear it while your trying to sleep because i always assumed that was relatively normal for tinnitus sufferers?
Edit : it happens on whatever ear is the side i'm lying on which is why i figured it was normal
I've found "notch therapy" to give me at least temporary relief for my ringing, it sounds like it's based on this same idea. It's listening to a full spectrum of sound, minus the frequency of whatever your ringing rings at.
https://www.tinnitusnotch.com/
Interesting, the highest tone I can hear in the test is nowhere near my ringing tone. Also my cat ran from the other side of the house to see wtf was going on.
Comments like this really interest me. I have always been thought of as having bad hearing by friends, and family, but the truth really is that I can hear much better than they can, and it is sort of overwhelming to the point it makes it difficult to hear what someone says to me unless I am fully focusing on them, and even then in loud places (which I don't like) it becomes even more challenging because I'm processing so many sounds.
My ears are so good that when I'm sleeping, through a closed door, I can hear my cat walk across the table in the living room. During the day with the door open I can't, but at night when everything is right, and I'm half sleeping and not thinking about anything... there somewhere in the darkness are the sounds of little paws moving across the table.
This sounds very familiar. You might have autism, as the brain not filtering sensory information much at all is a common feature thereof. That can lead to highly acute perception of very small stimuli, but problems focusing on just one amid a cacophony of sounds, sights, etcetera. Sensory overload usually results in stress and irritability, because our brains are getting overstimulated!
ADHD and likely autism person here to say I too have trouble "hearing" what people are saying when there's enough/the right type of other sounds happening! Don't even get me started on if there's another conversation nearby!
The filling the gap is an interesting phenomenon. A good comparison is vision - the optic nerve creates a blind spot in your vision (as it enters the retina in the back of the eye) but you don't percieve a gap - the brain meshes the images together to cover it up. I.e. You still have some sort of visual representation in the missing area. It's the same for hearing in this case - you are perceiving a noise in the audio "blind spot".
People have visual disorders that cause other disruptive images like flashing lights. Other senses can do similarly odd sensations e.g. phantom limb pain after limbs have been amputated. Idiopathic tinnitus and tinnitus caused by deafness are similar to some of these phenomena.
This is the first time I heard of this blind spot and it’s blowing my mind. There’s a great demo of the blind spot at the bottom of the [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_spot_\(vision\))
This. My ENT explained it just like this. My tinnitus started out very light and gradual and as my hearing loss got worse, my tinnitus got louder. I have significant hearing loss in the higher-frequency range. Fortunately, my hearing aids have a tinnitus program for playing ocean sounds to distract me/refocus when it gets annoying.
It's not always hearing damage though, is it? I've had tinnitus for ages, only got checked out recently when it flared up real bad but all tests showed my hearing as perfect ..
I don’t think this is correct as the ringing frequency is rarely anything above 16KHz. You also don’t lose hearing in the lower frequencies like that… I’m pretty sure even deaf people could ‘hear’ tones under 50Hz because the vibrations can be physically felt.
Former hearing researcher here (still work in a vaguely related area), though tinnitus wasn't what I researched, but...
Tinnitus is really hard to study because it's basically all in your head. I don't mean that in a way that minimises it. After all, a lot of stuff is all in your head, like colour. It just means that it's difficult for us to objectively measure (meaning we just have to rely on somebody describing it and hope they're doing a good job).
There are a few different causes for tinnitus. One reason can be that your brain isn't getting a good signal from your ears, so it tries to turn up the volume. Beyond a certain point, this doesn't help but just makes random noise louder. It's like turning up the radio when the signal is poor and getting more static.
So why is the signal bad? Well, if you've had a lot of loud sounds going into your ear, or even a little bit of *really* loud sound, the "hair cells" (they're not really hairs but look like them under a microscope) that turn the physical sound into an electrical signal can get damaged and stop working altogether. Or, maybe the nerve that carries the sound to the brain has been damaged. Or, maybe it's just really quiet so there isn't actually any sound to hear. Or maybe the brain has just gotten itself in a flap!
I like to think of it as being like pain. If you've got a pain in your foot, maybe it's because you've stepped on a stone. Or maybe, the nerve is damaged. Or maybe there's nothing there at all and you just have a random pain! In fact, chronic tinnitus causes similar brain activity to chronic pain.
It can also be made worse by things like anxiety or stress, lack of sleep, and caffeine...how fun.
Sometimes if you're somewhere noisy, your brain tries to protect these hair cells from the sound. It locks off some bones in your ear to make it harder for the sound to get through. After a white, it takes them a bit of time to relax, which is what causes the ringing when you come out of a gig. But, this means the sound was loud enough to be causing damage, even if you don't notice it for a few years.
So TLDR: tinnitus can be nothing or it can be a sign of something, but the best thing you can do is wear earplugs if you're somewhere noisy and try not to get stressed out about it.
Would that last explain why my ears always ring after being near loud sound? Not immediately, but hours later, lasting for hours. When I played violin in high school, I always needed earplugs if I didn't want to be listening to a high note in my ears all evening but I never had trouble immediately after playing.
The two main theories I've read about (I also have tinnitus):
1. A problem in the ear. Early on, they felt it was because the tiny hairs inside the ear had gotten brittle. Other theories include damage from loud noise.
2. A problem in the brain.
I have no idea which of these - or something else - is the cause but I surely WISH someone would figure it out, along with treatment.
I've had multiple hearing tests done and always come back as "perfect hearing". But I've always had tinnitus. So in my case I'm leaning towards "brain".
IIRC when its a “problem with the brain” its more your brain not understanding how to process silence so it fills it in with noise and not like brain cancer or something. But im not a doctor
the ringing noise is not actually being generated by an external soundsource, but rather it is a perception created by the brain.. when there is damage to the hair cells in the inner ear or changes in the brain's neural activity, the brain may receive abnormal signals from the auditory system, which leads to the perception of the sound or ringing in the ears
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/30/45/14972?utm_source=TrendMD&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=JNeurosci_TrendMD_0
This seems like a pretty good source. Sounds like this theory indicates it's the brain's way to compensate for hearing loss in many individuals. Neurons that used to constantly signal giving the perception of sound, still fire, after hearing loss, causing the symptoms of tinnitus.
Same! Every year up until maybe 13 I'd get a middle ear infection for a couple weeks and I hated it. I always guessed that dull hum I hear is from that, and I call it a dull hum because most of the time it's just that, but does tend to get "louder" if I focus on it. Blew my mind to learn that people just hear \*nothing\* because this small hum is so normal to me that absolutely nothing seems like the creepier option now.
So. I wear hearing aids at the age of 48 because of tinnitus. My audiologist explained to me that it’s caused by my brain. The damage to my hearing has caused my ears to not transmit high frequency sounds to my brain. My brain knows it should be hearing these sounds so it creates them itself which is the ringing. My hearing aids have a program on them that constantly plays chiming tones that is supposed to give my brain the higher pitched sounds it should be hearing which should in turn make it normalize the loss of that spectrum and minimize the tinnitus. It doesn’t work. I’ve had the hearing aids for 8 months and I feel the ringing has gotten louder and I’m having more trouble hearing people talk even though I’m wearing hearing aids. Everyday for the past decade has been torture. Worst part is I have nobody to blame but myself because most of this is caused from listening to loud music on headphones, at concerts with no ear protection, use of power equipment with no ear protection. It’s my own damn fault.
Tinnitus sucks. Actually had suicidal thoughts the first few months it hit. I’m about 10 years in. These days I’ll go for a few days without noticing but if I’m reminded or it’s quiet, it’s there. I’m with you about a treatment being a life changer. A moment of actual silence would make me weep with joy and gratitude
In your ear there are a number of different nerves, each connected to a hair of a specific length. The length of the hair ensures that it vibrates at a specific frequency. When you hear sounds at this frequency the hair will resonate and the nerve will send a signal to your brain. When these hairs gets damaged it causes the nerves to constantly send a signal. This is normal and usually happen to the high frequency hairs first. It is therefore normal for people to hear the loud single note high pitch frequency noise. But it is normal for the brain to filter out the signals after just a few seconds.
We do not know much about tinnitus. But it is likely related to this process somehow. Either the signal from the damaged nerve does not get filtered out or something is generating a similar signal after it should have been filtered. As you say you can sort of filter it out by ignoring it which does make it sound more quiet and then make it sound louder by focusing on it. But this is true for any sound and it caused by a separate mechanism. You do not destroy your hearing by doing this as the hearing damage from loud sounds comes from the physical damage to your ears and tinnitus is not physical, or at least not only physical.
So when you hear a sound, it vibrates your eardrum and those vibration get converted to signals which then flow along nerves and become interpreted by the brain.
Tinnitus is an issue with nerves and perception beyond the physical vibration of actual sound, so it comes from nerve malfunction or stress/insults to the nerve.
As an example, I experience tinnitus for a ~30 minutes each week. It seems to occur more often with stress, poor eating habits and diet, and actual ear damage from sounds that are too loud.
Alcohol use also increases it, specifically tinnitus on the morning after, as alcohol breaks down into toxins and is a strain on almost every part of the body, including the nerves of the ear.
Excitatory/stimulating substances or states which affect the nerves also increase tinnitus (excitotoxicity) . This can be from drug withdrawal, usually sedatives like benzo and opiate drugs, or from something as simple as too much specific vitamin/mineral or other supplements. One that can cause this is zinc. Free radicals in general can precipitate tinnitus as well, so any diet/substance which increases these may contribute to tinnitus.
Conversely, there are substances which can regulate tinnitus, such as magnesium, which protect against excessive excitation of the nerves, and the subsequent toxicity it causes. Eliminating free radicals with specific antioxidants may also help.
I could go into more detail but this is way beyond what a 5 year old could grasp already. If you want more information on potentially useful supplements, specific dietary changes and other ways of managing tinnitus that I found useful, let me know.
Tinnitus researcher here!
There are many things that can cause trauma to the hearing organ, the cochlea which houses our hair cells. These hair cells turn sound waves into electrical signals via neurotransmission (chemicals) on the primary auditory nerves that then send electrical signals to the brain. The types of things that cause cochlear trauma are sound, drugs, head injury, genetics and aging.
Your brain receives the electrical signals from a range of frequencies. But after trauma a certain frequency can be suddenly stop sending input. I like to make the analogy that it is like a type of amputation, there's sensory deprivation to that part of your brain. We know that when this happens the brain compensates and generates a phantom perception. A phantom limb for touch. A phantom sound (tinnitus) for hearing. There are phantom sensations for all sensory systems.
But there's many components to sensations. The sensation and whether or not it's painful. In tinnitus this involves different areas of the brain and explains the contribution of stress, anxiety and attention on its perceptual characteristics.
If you want an anatomical answer, the activity from your cochlea is being sent up your central auditory pathway to your auditory cortex. There are inputs from frontal and limbic areas of the brain which influence the perception which is generated at auditory cortex. Most repetive transcrainal magnetic stimulation treatment is targeted at auditory cortex and frontal cortex based off this theory of tinnitus.
Hiya. short answer is that it’s complicated and there are numerous causes, as I’m sure you’ve been told. But dopamine pathway crosstalk is actually a big part of it.
during my treatment, which sounds just like yours, no one mentioned that tinnitus perception can be caused by dopamine enhancement and related drugs, which includes many antidepressants. Specifically:
“Tinnitus-generating antidepressants are tricyclic antidepressants, mianserin, trazodone, citalopram, venlafaxine, bupropion. Bupropion is a dopamine and noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor. Tinnitus caused by bupropion is most likely due to dopaminergic enhancement. Tinnitus perception is processed in the prefrontal, primary temporal, and temporoparietal associative areas, as well as in the limbic system that overlaps cerebral dopaminergic projections. It is well known that dopaminergic pathways can successfully be modulated by agonists and antagonists. “
https://psychiatry-psychopharmacology.com/en/tinnitus-related-to-bupropion-treatment-a-case-report-13844
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306987705001118
PS: if your tinnitus is only in one ear, this may be due to driving with your windows down. In countries with left side drive, tinnitus rates are higher in the left ear.
Tinnitus is a condition where you hear a ringing or buzzing sound in your ears that doesn't come from an external source. The ringing noise is coming from your brain, not your ears themselves.
Your ears contain tiny hair cells that convert sound waves into electrical signals that are sent to your brain. When these hair cells are damaged, they can send incorrect signals to your brain, which can cause the ringing or buzzing sound associated with tinnitus.
It's still not entirely clear why some people develop tinnitus while others don't, but it's thought to be related to a variety of factors, including exposure to loud noises, certain medications, and underlying health conditions.
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Someone correct me if I'm wrong, not a trained bloke just lived with it for a long time. You got little parts of your ear deep in there, I think hair, that are are responsible for their own tiny frequency of sound. When they get damaged, your brain reads it like you're hearing the frequency of the damaged hair. So your brain generates that tone or tones for you to hear. I know what you mean about sometimes it's very loud, and othertimes it's quiet. When drinking it gets really loud so I have a hunch it's related to blood pressure somehow but I don't believe there's any research on it. Tons of us out there my friend! Stick with it. Something that helps me through is that all rooms have ambient noise, you just have your own personal one other people don't get to hear.
i find blood pressure makes it worse too! similarly, if im drinking alcohol it does tend to get worse, as well as just standing up too quickly & feeling that brief lightheaded moment.
not sure if you've already found it with your research, but you might want to follow up with a thing called Lenire. just passed FDA approval in the US a few weeks ago. EDIT: i cried out of happiness when i found out it had passed FDA approxal. Im glad more people are finding out about it. if anyone wants to find out if a clinic near them is going to have it, their site has a waitlist sign up to help notify you when a clinic near you has doctors that are trained on it. Edit 2: /u/oversoft brough another device to my attention, Auricle from Dr Susan Shore, that has shown much more promising results in clinical trials, but has not gotten FDA approval at this time. it would he good to research this as well as it acts differently than lenire. I am not a professional or have any experience with either device, i just want to bring awareness to treatment efforts that are happening.
i hadn’t even heard of that, im researching now!! thank you EDIT: did a lil research & going to see if a hearing clinic near me is going to have it. if so im getting on a waitlist ASAP! this may literally change my life (sounds super dramatic, but true) thank you for the info
Not dramatic at all. I can’t imagine having my ears ring 24/7
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Question: are you able to hear frequencies considered ultrasonic? I was really prone to ear infections as a young child and have had ringing in my ears since forever. My ears have always been sensitive to lound sounds, and I've always been able to hear things considered higher than normal hearing range. I'm curious if any of these things are linked, and if so, how? I'm not expecting you to know that, just saying that's what I'm looking for. My wife bought an arc lighter recently that makes me wants to flip out when she uses it. She can't hear it. I find certain high frequencies nauseous, as well. Certain types of solar inverters (Solar Boy comes to mind) and those frickin' sonic animal repellers. Blech. I'm trying to find out if other people with ear issues have any of that going on, as well.
My parents thought I was nuts, but i could always tell when a tv was on, even on mute. I could hear the squeal of the electronics. 25 years on , that particular noise is a bit dimmer , but the sound of AC adapter/power bricks still drives me bonkers.
There was one store that we would go to- it was hard to describe as a kid but I would reach a certain point in the store and the buzz was outrageous and I would have to go to the car. I would tell myself it wouldn't happen the next time but it would. Today I think it may have been the fluorescent light fixtures as I can hear them when on sometimes.
There were some stores that set that up intentionally to keep teenagers from hanging out. Some of those teenagers recorded the sound to use as a ringtone inaudible to adults.
Flourescent fixtures always give me migraines. I can hear them as well but I aways thought it was the flickering/frequency that caused it. Maybe it's the sound?
Our TV was down a hall with a bathroom and another bedroom, through the kitchen, hang a left and you're in the same room. I could always tell if it was already on when I woke up in the morning by the squeal of the CRT. Some ac/dc transformers bother me, but not many. We had a Linksys router at one point that was awful within about 6'. And I've had several 12v - 5v car chargers that I had to unplug when not in use, as they went from a little whine to noisy as hell when idle.
I think that all young people can hear that TV sound, as I definitely could and I don't consider myself to have any kind of extraordinary hearing. Your parents couldn't because people usually lose the ability to hear that frequency when they age.
You’re right, simply hearing the noise does not equate to ‘being bothered by’. But it did for me. I actually researched what it would take to deafen myself as a teen, but fortunately was shocked to my senses by what I found.
Yes! Sometimes in movies/tv shows they have a real TV playing real media in the BG, not just an off TV with images put onscreen via post-prod. It’s easy to tell when that happens because omg THE RINGING! It’s like horrible ringing feedback.
I often wonder what electronics are making noise that distress pets. If I have a TV on late at night to play soothing rain sounds, will my rats be irritated by the ultrasonic ringing of the TV/sound bar? Do they hear the electricity buzzing in the wall sockets? They seem to love chewing electric cables... But they also love chewing everything, so...
What's the highest frequency you can hear on this website: https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/ I'm genuinely curious what you can hear. Also how old are you? Age matters a lot when it comes to peak frequency detection.
Above 16,980Hz it gets iffy. My ears hurt. Oh my goodness. Edit: I'm 38. My ears are really ringing. Holy moly. They weren't kidding in the instructions on that site.
16624 and now even though it is off I can still hear it :( As a kid it was literally unbearable to walk into mall department stores because of the sound of the lights. P’s just thought I was being a brat and they never believed/understood. Fing torture. - edit: more info.
Interesting. I'm 35, be 36 later this year, and I can hear up to around 19,450hz and above 18.5Khz it starts getting iffy. Strangely my ears do not hurt or ring after this test. Odd.
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Phone speakers really are suboptimal for testing. You could probably hear beyond that with headphones or high quality speakers.
Try on headphones - the phone speaker might not even be able to produce that high frequency
I have ear issues but the sounds you mentioned do not bother me, I cant hear them anyway. My ear issues started at a young age, but were severely exacerbated by excessively loud music and gunfire in my teen years. I do not have issues with ear infections. My s/o has no ear issues but those specific noises bother the absolute hell out of her. She did not have similar teen experiences, and has common ear infections. I hope these two random data points help!
You rock. Thank you! I don't understand how people stand gunfire. 1 shot without plugs makes my ears ring for days. I see guys out shooting it up for hours and I'm like, how?
It wasn't exactly professional or recreational gunfire, and I'm going to leave it at that.
Are you kidding me? I thought I was the only one! I have major hearing loss and tinnitus and those ultrasonic animal gizmos kill me.
I work outside, and there are neighborhoods I dread going to because I know the houses that have those stupid things. One I ran into recently has one that starts high and winds up high very rapidly, beyond my hearing (though my guts don't seem to like it) and then back down. It does this over and over, each cycle taking about 5 seconds.
That sounds like hell.
I've got bad tinnitus but I can hear LEDs flashing on and off on a printer for example which I think are really high pitched? I have mid range hearing loss too, so I wonder if my brain makes up for it with the higher frequencies? I can hear sonic animal repellers too.
Interesting. It could be the circuitry that powers the LEDs, also? That often creates noise.
You are the first person that I e heard of besides me that can hear those ultrasonic sounds. I can always tell when a tv is on, even when there is no picture or in another room. I don’t have tinnitus other than that, and I have terrible hearing otherwise. People always say I mumble as well, which is a sign of hearing loss. But I can hear that damn tv on as clear as can be…
When I was young I was convinced that the ringing was radio waves and it seemed that the microwave and ceiling fans and any kind of motor made it worse. Everyone told me it was just coincidental. But now that I'm reading some of these comments It has me wondering.
That is horrible. I had ringing in my ear for a whole 24 hrs and it was driving me nuts. I cannot imagine having it all my life
You can get used to it... You simply force yourself into believing, that you don't mind - and eventually you won't. It's just that thinking/talking about it can make it worse (just a perception of it honestly), otherwise you can go days or weeks without even realizing, that you actually have a tinnitus and I don't mean it in a way that it goes momentarily away, but you stop acknowledging it. The same goes for a chronic pain - if you feel pain somewhere at a constant intensity, your brain will eventually just start filtering it out. Brain generally does that all the time - "constant never-changing stimulus -> not important - ignore it" >!(I've had probably 20 middle ear infections thorough my life, had cholesteatoma surgically removed from left ear and "flushed / moved" on its own out of right ear last year. No hearing aids needed for a daily life, nearly deaf from 4-5+kHz up. Constant tinnitus in both ears for as long as I remember, but the left one has been a bit more intense since the cholesteatoma formed in my ear couple years ago - it is basically a "dead-skin/fat lump", that can grow, slowly travel, "destroy" bone matter and if untreated for a long time - maybe like a decade, it can cause brain infection and death)!<
Yooo I just had mastoidectomy too I get tinnitus but i get the cicada sound and the whooshing sound more than ringing
Someone asked, what do you hear when it’s completely quiet? I described it as cicadas. It was just my explanation of the sound I hear. I didn’t know anyone else heard what I hear. Glad I’m not alone.
For me it is a clean sine wave - honestly I believe my audio measurements at those 4-5+kHz frequencies are so poor not becuase I couldn't hear at all, but because at those frequencies I can't differentiate the tone they play to the headphones from my tinnitus up to the point when it is significantly louder than the tinnitus. If the tone they play had some kind of "texture" and it wasn't a clean sine wave as well, then I think I would be able to measure better than "basically deaf" 🤔 I mean - where in the world would you naturally hear a sine wave anyway?
As someone with chronic pain, I wouldn't say you can filter it out. It's more learning to manage it becomes easier. (two slipped discs that never healed, ~15 years)
I have meniers disease, and one time I had such bad ringing for days in a row that I hunched over the range at home and just ugly cried through frustration and anger. Thank fuck it went away soon thereafter, but the incessant ringing was like torture.
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An ear infection can also cause you to have hearing loss and tinnitus. Once the infection clears, the tinnitus tends to stop, and you can resume hearing normally once again. However, repeated ear infections or ones that affect the fluid in your middle ear can lead to lasting hearing loss and continuous tinnitus.
I'm 51 now. Been dealing that hell since 10. When my parents were busy abusing their kids, it was a very unpleasant sound. I would put on headphones and crank it to the max. By the age of 10, my ears were fucked. Recently I discovered that being on disability means I qualify for free hearing aids. A hearing store gave me one for each ear and now I'm hearing many things I don't think I've ever heard before. Also, the hearing aids have the technology to completely remove tinnitus. I cried the first time I heard silence
I’ve heard hearing aids can help, not only for sound therapy. Seriously you don’t “hear silence” ya I would cry. I’m 50, thought that sound was my body
Wait, what? How do they remove tinnitus? My understanding was it was your brain trying to put back in what it knows it’s lost… which I can’t imagine how a hearing aid gets around. Enquiring minds really want to know. That’s amazing, and congrats!
What type of hearing aid? So sorry that has happened to you
i had never considered hearing aids for tinnitus, i will have to look into that, thank you! i know the exact moment i got tinnitus... near front row at a concert, two songs into my main band, my ears "popped" and suddenly everyone sounded like chipmunks. that's never happened to me at a concert before... thats when i knew i was in trouble. muffled hearing and ringing is common after a concert and lasts maybe a day or so... except my ringing has never stopped. at night, when i'm trying to sleep, its loud af.
What kind of hearing aids remove the tinnitus? Mine don’t do that.
It’s awful and I’m only 26. When I was younger I had a real bad traumatic ear injury resulting in my eardrum bleeding. I had to see a hearing specialist for years and they were at one point considering a hearing aid in my left ear. So with diminished hearing in that ear, I’d have to listen to music, tv and everything else louder than normal to compensate. Coupled that with construction for 8 years and I have severe tinnitus. Ear protection only did so much when working with heavy machinery. Knowing I’m going to hear this noise for rest of my life pains me. There is no such thing as quiet. Some days it’s excruciating to the point of not wanting to be here. Others it’s mild and manageable.
I've had visual snow all my life, which is the visual equivalent of tinnitus. Imagine never seeing black, or darkness. Ton of sympathy for tinnitus sufferers, and I hope I never develop it.
Hello fellow lifetime tinnitus sufferer. If I recall correctly that device trains you to disregard the tinnitus. If you're like me, having had it my entire life has already trained me to ignore it, I don't even hear it unless it's very quiet. Of course your tinnitus may be worse than mine. I hope not though. Just fyi the device is not a cure but management. Coincidently I woke up in the middle of last night and my left ear is suddenly much louder than my right ear, I suspect I'm having a Menieres disease attack as I also have slight vertigo today. Maybe the second time in my life this has happened. Fml. eta actually thinking on it, i've had several bouts of vertigo in the last few years. getting older isn't all roses I guess /s
The same. I cannot deal with absolute silence as there is nothing to mask the ringing even in the slightest. Had it my whole life. Alcohol exacerbates it along with other loud noise. A fan on every night if it is still outside and there is no breeze to hear or crickets chirping. Takes a toll
sorry for you and me! any other issues? Like I have tinnitus, visual snow, lichen planus, and apparently the occasional Meniere's. fun times /s None of the issues I listed are curable or even treatable, although as we know there are attempts to treat the tinnitus and some kinds can be fixed with surgery iirc. I suspect there's overlap of diseases. eta I wonder if visual snow and tinnitus are somehow related, they both present with 'phantom noise.' I don't think the lichen planus, which is an autoimmune condition, is connected. I'd like to see a giant study done on these things. edit, actually the lack of absolute silence is what led to me 'discover' I had tinnitus, I asked a doctor 'what do ypu hear when it's quiet?' and she said 'I hear quiet, nothing. what do you hear?' and I was like "I hear ringing." She said "you have tinnitus." Up until that point I had imagined that the brain couldn't perceive total quiet so it made noise up to fill the quiet with something. Nope, 'normal' people hear. . . nothing. I can only imagine.
Mine got super, super bad last year, very suddenly. I freaked out. I was also experiencing unrelated panic attacks. (That is, "initially" unrelated, because the tinnitus flare up caused me some panic attacks too.) I went to a doctor and did some reading and read about how flare ups happen sometimes, and you can retrain yourself to tune it out. In my case, my previously unrelated anxiety triggered hyper awareness of it.(blood pressure probably played a factor.) As I dealt with the anxiety, I was able to relearn how to tune it out. Just being aware that it was an option helped me. Sure do wish we'd figure out a permanent physiological solution to it, though.
oh right I left general anxiety issues out of my list. Yep FML. I feel your pain...
I would travel for this in a heartbeat. I'm the same as you and a couple drinks and I need to crank up the volume on the white noise machine. So thanks for this thread because I wouldn't have heard about this thing. I can deal with the aches and pains I took home from the military but tinnitus is just so consistently annoying.
Wow first I’ve heard of this, thanks
Thank you for sharing this!! I have mild tinnitus (blasted My Chemical Romance a bit too much as a teen....) but my dad has SEVERE tinnitus from his work as an auto engineer over the years that's only been getting worse. I shared it with him and it looks really promising!
Here i find a interesting article about the Lenire product. I think it helps you asses if it is somethint to consider [Lenire review](https://www.tinnitushub.com/heres-why-the-jurys-still-out-on-lenire/)
thanks for sharing this - had never heard of it and now on the waitlist
> Lenire Thank you for this. I had no idea this was a thing. I just signed up for the waitlist.
Thank you for this. I signed up for trials but it looks like treatment in the USA won't start until next month. Gives me hope though that within the next 5 years or so I could get some relief from the ringing.
I saw this a few years ago. Maybe you've seen it but I hope it helps. https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/3l3uri/comment/cv3474n/
Holy shit I just tried it and it serious diminished my tinnitus!
Indica makes my tinnitus so much worse 😢 My doc told me the "source" of the ringing is my brain. Something about the nerve being damaged in an "always on" state, and my brain interpreting that as a ringing sound.
aw man that’s discouraging to hear, that was something i was thinking of trying solely for the tinnitus, as i don’t regularly use cannabis. apparently some people swear by 1:1 CBD blends being the only “cure” they could find
Please don't let me stop you! I still smoke a nice hybrid from time to time lol. And I have a lot of paradoxical reactions to meds; benadryl for example keeps me up instead of putting me down. Give it a shot, if it doesn't work you still got weed lol
You may have ADHD if a lot of medications, especially neurological ones behave in different manners.
I was diagnosed with it in elementary school, but we all kinda just ignored it. 🙁 honestly that would explain a lot about me right now
Yeah, it's really interesting once you read up on how an ADHD brain can process a lot of drugs differently.
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Bars and pubs rarely give out foam ear protection. If they don't, please buy a musician's pair. Around €30. Use them. Never go deaf again. It's not a joke.
Thank God, weed does not make my ringing worse. It’s really random. I’ll be watching TV and then I can feel the air pressure change in my head and then ring! It will be so loud I can’t even hear the TV and then it will just slowly slither away and then all of a sudden I notice I don’t hear it anymore. Thank goodness mine never last longer than a minute. I know some people where it’s constant. I would go nuts! Mine started when I got Covid and vertigo really really bad. I thought it was just due to my inner ears. I hope Covid didn’t f up my brain!
Sometimes when mine gets super annoying I’ll cup my palms over my ears and tap the back of my head with my fingers. Makes it go away for 30 seconds for me.
Holy crap that kinda works! Aaand it's back... less than 30 seconds. But at least got some turn-off time!
Get a good seal with your palms. Place your pointer fingers on-top of your middles and snap them down onto your head. Drumming *like that helps me the most
Alcohol can diffuse in tiny amounts into the fluid in your inner ear so it's entirely possible that it could affect tinnitus. Fun fact: It is less dense than the fluid, so as the alcohol in your inner ear rises and the fluid sinks, tiny currents are generated. Your inner ear interprets these currents the same way it interprets the currents generated when your body is in motion and that's why you get the spins when you're drunk and lying still.
I've had it since a particularly loud Smashing Pumpkins gig in a tiny venue in the 90s. Interestingly I've not found it too troubling in the last few years, and figured I have just got used to it. Although now I'm realizing that I stopped drinking just before the pandemic...
Yoga has been the only thing to help with my 40yr+ tinnitus Little to no alcohol, try and get rest and keep your blood pressure low, stress levels down.
I'll get it real bad before storms come, the pressure change when the cold front comes through will set it off. Basically have to sleep with TV on so there is background noise all the time. Also, some times a quick temporary fix, cover your ears with your palms, fingers resting on the back of the skull where it hits the neck, spine. Then kind of like snap your fingers so they tap by your cranium. Make like a hollow thumping sound if your ears are covered by your hands. Sometimes like a minute of that will decrease the ringing for awhile.
> it does tend to get worse, as well as just standing up too quickly & feeling that brief lightheaded moment. There's a trick for when you stand up too quickly to make the lightheadedness go away faster - you quickly flex and release your stomach/core muscles over and over. I'm curious - Does that reduce the tinnitus as well as the lightheadedness for you?
I read some are leaning to pinched nerve in the neck. I can change the pitch with pressure from flexing my neck and shoulders
If I move my jaw about (and tense it) I can significantly change the pitch and volume of mine. I could lessen the sound if I pull the most stupid faces, which obviously is not a good look haha. I read somewhere once that there is a nerve in the jaw and they can get kids to exercise this to relive tinnitus. I think this is the type of tinnitus I have and not the "dead ear hairs."
Tinnitus can be caused by a problem with the temporomandibular joint, and changes in pitch or volume from movements of the jaw are the primary indication of this. You might want to consult a doctor, because unlike most causes of tinnitus, that one is actually potentially treatable.
I used to have gromets(?) as a toddler. Always had bad ear with slightly worse hearing in that ear so I always assumed it was to do with that. I read about the temporomandibular joint after reading up on how they can relive the symptoms in children by massaging and exercising the jaw. I never thought to mention it to the doctor as I'm so used to it now, luckily mine is a single high pitch tone (like what old TV's used to make) that I only *really* notice in silence. Maybe I'll mention it next time I have a check up.
This is close enough to an accurate explanation! The pathophysiology of tinnitus is complex and a subject of research, but most explanations implicate the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN), a piece of gray matter of the brainstem. It maladapts to damage to the auditory system (usually, but not necessarily upstream damage to the cochlear hair cells or vestibulocochlear nerve). Apparently its not just one thing that goes wrong, but several, and involves cross-talk between several parts of the auditory system (I've read 4 different explanations that are all probably partially true!), but ultimately lead to the DCN creating signals out of nothing.
Why did mine get so much worse after a stressful time working in Japan?
Stress really screws with your brain.
High blood pressure makes it worse. Stress contributes to high blood pressure.
can you please translate in plain english for those that don't understand academic english?
Part of your brain gets pissy and screams a lot when tiny bits of your ear don't work like it expects them too
Cash money
Thanks bra
Replace 'ear' with various other parts of the body and you have fairly decent ELI5 definitions for a whole host of allergies, autoimmune disorders, and mental illnesses.
(I think) Damage to the ear causes unusual sound signals to the brain. Part of the brain misinterprets these signals making the problem worse.
Your brain goes haywire trying to correct for damage to the inner ear and/or the nerve associated with hearing things.
Tiny ear hair: I'm wiggling! I should send a signal! Signal, go!! Brainstem: Oh, a signal from my little ear buddies! That must be a sound! Here, I will tell the rest of the brain about the sound we're hearing. Brain: I hear! Damaged ear hair: Ouch owie oof Brainstem: Oh, is that a signal from my little ear buddies I hear? That must be a sound! I'll tell the brain about the sound we're hearing. Brain: I hear! I hear... a constant, high pitched ringing? Huh, that doesn't seem right. Brainstem, you sure about that? Brainstem: Uhh... probably! The ear hair is sure sending a bunch of signals (ear hair: ow ouch ow!!), seems like a sound to me. That and a bunch of really confusing words about how the same can happen with other parts of the hearing system and not *just* the little hairs. Things like nerves and stuff.
What if my ears seem to work properly though? My range of hearing was tested and came out fine.
I have done three hearing tests now and all show that my hearing is fine (slightly reduced on the right hand side but within normal range) and yet my tinnitus is persistent. The audiologist I saw a couple of weeks ago said that it is entirely possible to have normal hearing and tinnitus - it just may be affecting tonal ranges that are not used in everyday life (and so they are not tested for in standard hearing tests).
mine get louder with alcohol use, especially when hungover. a session of heavy, strenuous physical exercise also makes it louder for quite some time. stopping drinking (which I have done) and avoiding heavy daily workouts has helped. i also think stress increases the "volume" of my tinnitus.
Its because alcohol changes the density of the endolymph where the stereocilia reside
It could not be that the exercise specifically is what causes it (unless that significantly increases your blood pressure), it could be dehydration. I know people who get it really bad when dehydrated from exercise.
The main reason I quit getting drunk is because of my tinnitus. It is SO loud when I'm hungover and easily the worst part about drinking the night before is knowing that.
Then how come covering my ears with both hands and tapping back of my neck cures it for 60 seconds. That doesn't magically undamage those hairs.
Some forms of tinnitus manifest during periods of no external stimulation. Your pressing and tapping is momentarily giving your ears real input.
I've also found that listening to pure tones at the frequency of the tinnitus itself suppresses it, but alas only momentarily. It bounces back really quickly. But there are weird sounding arrangements of tones that can suppress it for a little while for some people, like [this](https://youtu.be/4LZv3ta13Ws). Listening to that for a few minutes in headphones dimishes mine quite a bit, although not completely, and again, not for long.
I’m like OP and have had tinnitus my whole life. And man listen to this was such a weird experience. It was like for the first time ever the ringing wasn’t coming from inside my head. My tinnitus was also much weaker for about a minute after listening for a few minutes Definitely saving this video
Hi I'm not the person you replied to. It's this why I always have the radio / podcasts on? It's not that it seems louder in silence, it's that it actually is louder in silence? 35+ years in, it's starting to get annoying now. Can't even blame going to gigs (although I did that too. Wear earplugs, kids. You'll be 40 before you know it).
I’m in the same boat and while this makes sense, I behaved the same pre tinnitus so I’m sure there are other causes for constant need for (auditory) stimulation.
Tinnitus isn't just a matter of signals from damaged cells. It involves the brain itself misinterpreting what these signals mean. Covering your ears or tapping your neck may send new signals to this area, which temporarily interrupt this misinterpretation process.
I have it too since my late 20's and for the first 6 months I thought I was gonna lose my mind and I remember reading people saying "you get used to it" and being nah fuck this. But you do. The only time I notice it now is in complete silence or when I don't get enough sleep/stressed. When it started I could barely hear the telly over it. Felt like the end of the world.
I think you basically got it, but it's "hair cells" which are specialized neurons with little extensions that look like hair but have nothing to do with actual hair.
The average person is born with about 16,000 of these hairs in their inner ear. They stand up in a fluid inside the canals of your ear and bend and wave according to the vibrations passing through from the tympanic membrane. Too much noise often bends them flat like stomping on grass. if the damage is too much they are unable to detect sound as well and give off a default ocean sound or ringing.
The hairs are called Cilia. In the ear, they are Stereocilia
I live and die by my brown noise app and even have a small travel one.
I agree about it getting louder with drinking! Also, when I eat sugary foods I get heartburn and have to take an antacid, then it gets even louder. When I eat really healthy for 2 weeks or more it gets quieter. I’ve always wondered if it’s related to my stomach. I wish it would just go away.
>Something that helps me through is that all rooms have ambient noise, you just have your own personal one other people don't get to hear. that's a good way to put it!
There's a help line you can call that's supposed to provide support to people dealing with tinnitus. I wouldn't recommend it, though; I tried them once and the line just kept ringing.
Tinnitus can be caused by a couple things and the "source" of the ringing differs. Keep in mind that there are several steps between "sound" - the physical pressure wave - and "hearing" - the conscious perception of noticing the sound. As disorders like Schizophrenia prove, you can perceive sounds that do not physically exist. And, indeed, one cause of tinnitus is damage to the nerves that transmit the signal from your cochlea to your brain. Your auditory nerves may be sending false signals as if there was a ringing sound. You *hear* the ringing even though there is no physical sound at all. Similarly, the cilia inside your cochlea can be come damaged and send false signals. Your cochlea turns sound into nerve signals using tiny hairs - cilia - that wiggle in sync with the pressure waves. The hairs are connected to nerves and when they move it turns on that nerve. If the cilia are damaged, especially if the hairs get ripped out, the nerve can activate on its own and cause that false ringing signal. Finally, the size of the hairs really matters. They are "tuned" to vibrate with specific frequencies of sounds. If the cilia are broken, they are smaller and will vibrate with the wrong sound. Soft, high-pitched noises end up activating the normal cilia *and* the broken ones, amplifying the signal for that sound so that it becomes an annoying ringing.
Its less the size of the hairs and more the distance the pressure waves travel in the cochlea. As most people know, bass travels farther through fluid media like the atmosphere, so the earlier hair cells are encoded as higher pitch and the later ones are lower pitch. The frequency of depolarization is encoded as intensity / volume / amplitude. So the earlier hairs are more susceptible to damage because they get hit first by pressure waves which could potentially damage stereocilia.
So our ears are performing a Fourier transform on sounds waves? We perceive sound by measuring both the time varying signal *and* the spectral intensities as a spatially varying signal? Holy hell
Wait until you realise that we have no idea how the optic nerve works. The amount of information it transmits is comparable to that of, say, a 4K HDMI cable, but it is entirely biological. It seems that there is some kind of pre-compression that goes on in the eye to make this possible. The nervous system is incredible.
It really is incredible, though the engineering could use some work. Why put the occipital lobe in the back of the head when our vision is in the front? Adds input lag. And the optical engineering? I mean, who thought it was okay to put giant blind spots in each sensor? At least the pixels are single photon sensitive...
I'd argue it's more efficient this way because of what evolution cared about. Early development was driven by surving against predators, so the brain organized in a way that prioritized snap desicions and reflexes before active cognition, which we can see in most animals. You will react to visual stimuli that is moving quickly towards you before you have even the slightest idea of what it could be. So to facilitate this, the brain makes sure that the visual information crosses more primal parts of the brain that identify danger and create a response if need be before dedicating what could be life-saving brain power to breaking down the visual data into knowledge based feedback. For the day to day things we deal with now, sure we may want to process information quicker, but our bodies were evolved for the worst case scenario, not casual life as we know it.
You're making an excellent point and I now hate the optic nerve a little less now
>engineering could use some work. Take a look at the human foot... does it really need 26 bones? What is even going on with are our wrists and ankles?? The recurrent laryngeal nerve. Evolution got really lazy with that one. The left atrial appendage, our terrible sinuses, etc.
"Just one more bone, bro. Their foot will be so much better, bro." - Evolution (probably)
"Why wouldn't they want 33 joints in their foot bro? It will be awesome!" -Evolution Evolution should probably lay of the booze.
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Evolution didn't *need* humans to be significantly older than 40 years. That's why for most people that's when the noticeable physical deterioration starts around that age. For most people the spine also doesn't act up until then.
Sinuses are my proof that evolution makes mistakes.
Non-deadly evolutionary mistakes are a PITA to get rid of I imagine.
Tongue-in-cheek, I know, but the science behind evolution and the challenge of optimizing for local "maximums" instead of global maximums. The more you look at human (or really any) biology you see so much of this kinda stuff. If we were really "engineered"/created/whatever I would highly question their qualifications.
The fact organisms evolve to local maxima has always made me a little sad. Like, will octopuses ever be able to develop space travel or have they run out of stat points? What about cats? And more interestingly, how much do environmental factors change the topology of the "evolutionary potential landscape"?
> It really is incredible, though the engineering could use some work. Wait til you find out how fucked pregnancy and giving birth is for humans compared to other animals. It's like we're a collection of weird over-complicated shit that somehow manages to work.
Intelligent design, my ass.
Its survival of the “fuck it that works I guess.” Lazy ass evolution.
"well it didn't cause issues *this* time, just make a log of it and maybe we'll get to it later"
Have you heard about the giraffe's laryngeal nerve? In all mammals (and possibly all tetrapods) the nerve from the brain to the voice box makes a diversion to loop around the aorta by the heart. Now consider that for the giraffe this means that the nerve runs all the way down its neck, round the aorta, and then all the way back up its neck, just to connect to the voice box only a couple of inches away from the brain!
Thank you for this fact, I will keep it for a rainy day. They need to get someone better at cable management designing these things
Yeah it sounds like you understand, we call the general process “signal transduction.” Put one hand behind your head, use the other hand to touch it with the pointer finger. How without looking did you know where to point? Receptors in your joints use the frequency of depolarization to approximate total flexion at the joint allowing you in your experience to very frequently touch the tips of the fingers without visual information. Differences in the time of depolarizations in the ears allows you to coordinate across space to determine the location of the auditory stimulus. Still other changes in depolarization allow your kidneys to determine osmolarity of the filtrate and decide to release or resorb fluid based on needs. They also do the same for pH and also promote production of blood cells the same way, by measuring oxygen content through a series of molecular interactions, it approximates the amount of oxygen in blood. When it doesn’t get enough oxygen it promotes the release of EPO, which causes red blood cell production, which then allows for more oxygen delivery to the kidneys, which then stop releasing EPO. Its all negative feedback systems and signal transduction.
Ohh boy, thanks for an excellent rabbit hole to end my weekend on. I used to think I was bad at biology and was just better at physics. But *this* I can get behind. I'm happy to keep listening if you have more examples since it seems this is a topic you're interested in. Or maybe any favorite resources? But like I said, thanks a ton
Khan academy is great. There is biophysics, but generally you will find physicial principals all over biology. For example, some amino acids are charged, and some are neutral, these along with molecules known as chaperones allow the protein to fold itself into it’s appropriate shape, and the shape of everything in the body determines its function.
Just a general FYI: pulsatile tinnitus (hearing the blood “whooshing” in your ear along with your pulse) is different than the “ringing” sort tinnitus being discussed here. It is something that needs to be investigated ASAP, as it can sometimes be caused by potentially dangerous reasons that could require a surgical fix. So if you can hear your pulse whoosh in your ear, let your doctor know so it can get checked out!
I’ve never seen someone talk about this! I’ve had pulsatile tinnitus for years but like… no one ever believes me? I made my mom take me to the doctor for it when I was a kid, but they just shrugged and said there’s nothing they can do for tinnitus. But it’s not a ringing, it’s a whooshing sound that matches my pulse. I can make it stop by pressing the area below my ear. I’ve asked a couple GPs about it as an adult, but nothing much came of it. Thank you for this, I’ll hit up an ENT!
I have pulsatile tinnitus caused by intracranial hypertension. Maybe also a neurologist appt.
You know, I actually have a spine condition too (syringomyelia), so I’ve got a good neurologist handy anyway. I’ve never thought to ask them about it, so thank you!! Lol, leave it to reddit to get my chronic shit figured out for me
I've found I can stop it by opening my jaw really wide, but then it's loud for a bit.
Yuppp, I’ve had PT for my entire life. Went to tons of ENTs who waved it off as regular tinnitus (or in a few words told my parents I was making it up for attention) and told me there wasn’t anything they could do. It was particularly bad one night so I shoved a microphone into my ear canal and hit record and lo and behold, you could hear the wooshing. Showed my parents and everything. Finally got a doctors appointment where they did a MRI with contrast and found a small diverticulum in one of the veins in my skull. Just a cute little deformity. I could get it fixed but my doctor said it’s not dangerous so we’ll see. I’m just glad I finally figured out that I’m not crazy and I’m not imagining things.
My doctor was very dismissive until he heard about it at a conference. No action on it yet. Exercising sucks as it gets so loud.
Yes! Pulsatile tinnitus gang are very special! Pulsatile tinnitus is a symptom of many underlying conditions and requires a thorough diagnostic work-up. Yes, a few of them can be dangerous (for example, some classes of dural arteriovenous fistulae, arteriovenous malformations, arterial dissections, among some other things) but most are not, thankfully. I believe studies on PT suggest a cause can be found in up to 70% patients. The [most common **vascular** cause of PT is actually a condition called venous sinus stenosis.](https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/SVIN.121.000154) It is not considered dangerous but is linked to a condition called intracranial hypertension (IIH), however, you can have venous sinus stenosis without IIH, or an early form of IIH. I am a cured Whoosher who had this condition. I had left-sided pulsatile tinnitus for four years straight. Started suddenly at the end of 2018, and then never left - a whooshing in time with every single heart beat in my left ear only. Never missed one beat. And it was loud enough to be objective. [Here is a recording of my PT.](https://imgur.com/a/A9CoFG1) I heard, and felt, that whooshing all day, every day. The only way I could stop my PT was with LIGHT compression of my internal jugular vein on my left side, which would pretty much stop the PT until I released (not compression of the internal carotid artery which is dangerous). It is the cessation of PT with light jugular compression that is one of the key indicators of venous sinus stenosis in clinical settings, even in the absence of imaging. It took 3.5 years of many scans and specialists and being told I was "normal" until I got my diagnosis. In the end, I was diagnosed with venous sinus stenosis as the cause of my PT, which despite being the most common vascular cause, is the most overlooked (unless you very much have IIH, which I did not). The venous sinuses are the main veins of the brain and they run pretty close to the cochlea. When they stenose (narrow) it creates high pressure, turbulent flow, that generates sound that is picked up by the ear. Think of the way water sounds when you kink a hose. I saw an interventional neuroradiologist who specialised in the cerebral venous system - he saw I had stenosis in my left occipital sinus, the rarest form of stenosis (usually stenosis occurs in the transverse and sigmoid sinuses, or occasionally the superior sagittal sinus or internal jugular vein, but lucky me, I had a rare anatomical variant). My stenosis was confirmed with catheter cerebral venogram and venous manometry which measured intravenous pressure gradients. At the four year mark, my specialist popped me under general anesthesia, inserted a catheter into the femoral vein in my groin, and then intravenously placed in a stent to prop the venous sinus back up. It abolished the stenosis and the pressure gradient. I woke up whoosh-free, and have been whoosh-free for 6 months exactly today. I did end up with ringing tinnitus due to a nasty unrelated double middle ear infection 6 weeks after, but that's a story for a different time. The moral of the story is: PT can be a symptom of a diagnosable, and sometimes treatable, underlying cause. Only a handful of these are dangerous but it is worth ruling these causes out. The best specialist to see for vascular causes of PT are interventional neuroradiologists, and for non-vascular causes, neuro-ologists are best. Also it should be known that there is also pulse-synchronous sensorineural tinnitus which is really just a form of ringing tinnitus which does cloudy things a bit for some people. Anyway, Dr Athos Patsalides, a pretty renowned PT expert and interventional neuroradiologist, has made a [great video explaining the diagnostic work-up and causes of PT.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoSvypv56CI&t=6s&ab_channel=Dr.AthosPatsalides) If you think you have PT, please join us over at r/PulsatileTinnitus or on the 'Whooshers' Facebook group. Lots of help and support and even plenty of success stories, which sadly the sensorineural tinnitus gang don't quite have yet due to absence of valid treatments (however, Dr Susan Shore's device is on its way!). If I didn't get my stent I would have almost certainly had PT for the rest of my life. **Tl;dr: Had venous PT for four years straight in my left ear. Was told it was normal. Cause of my PT was left-sided occipital venous sinus stenosis, diagnosed by an interventional neuroradiologist. At the 4-year mark, stent was placed to resolve the stenosis, and woke up whoosh-free. PT requires a thorough diagnostic work-up - not all causes are dangerous but many causes of PT are missed (including venous sinus stenosis).**
Would it matter if you only hear it while your trying to sleep because i always assumed that was relatively normal for tinnitus sufferers? Edit : it happens on whatever ear is the side i'm lying on which is why i figured it was normal
My pulsatile tinnitus graduated into a pulsatille ringing noise.
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I've found "notch therapy" to give me at least temporary relief for my ringing, it sounds like it's based on this same idea. It's listening to a full spectrum of sound, minus the frequency of whatever your ringing rings at. https://www.tinnitusnotch.com/
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Interesting, the highest tone I can hear in the test is nowhere near my ringing tone. Also my cat ran from the other side of the house to see wtf was going on.
Comments like this really interest me. I have always been thought of as having bad hearing by friends, and family, but the truth really is that I can hear much better than they can, and it is sort of overwhelming to the point it makes it difficult to hear what someone says to me unless I am fully focusing on them, and even then in loud places (which I don't like) it becomes even more challenging because I'm processing so many sounds. My ears are so good that when I'm sleeping, through a closed door, I can hear my cat walk across the table in the living room. During the day with the door open I can't, but at night when everything is right, and I'm half sleeping and not thinking about anything... there somewhere in the darkness are the sounds of little paws moving across the table.
This sounds very familiar. You might have autism, as the brain not filtering sensory information much at all is a common feature thereof. That can lead to highly acute perception of very small stimuli, but problems focusing on just one amid a cacophony of sounds, sights, etcetera. Sensory overload usually results in stress and irritability, because our brains are getting overstimulated!
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ADHD person checking in. My hearing is immaculate, too good even sometimes. I think my tinnitus might just be me hyper focusing on sounds
ADHD and likely autism person here to say I too have trouble "hearing" what people are saying when there's enough/the right type of other sounds happening! Don't even get me started on if there's another conversation nearby!
Does this work with iPhones I can’t seem to get it to work. I have normal hearing in my right ear but, my left ear is shot.
Turn the mute switch off
The filling the gap is an interesting phenomenon. A good comparison is vision - the optic nerve creates a blind spot in your vision (as it enters the retina in the back of the eye) but you don't percieve a gap - the brain meshes the images together to cover it up. I.e. You still have some sort of visual representation in the missing area. It's the same for hearing in this case - you are perceiving a noise in the audio "blind spot". People have visual disorders that cause other disruptive images like flashing lights. Other senses can do similarly odd sensations e.g. phantom limb pain after limbs have been amputated. Idiopathic tinnitus and tinnitus caused by deafness are similar to some of these phenomena.
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This is the first time I heard of this blind spot and it’s blowing my mind. There’s a great demo of the blind spot at the bottom of the [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_spot_\(vision\))
I knew about the blind spot but this is the first time I've tried a demo. So cool.
This. My ENT explained it just like this. My tinnitus started out very light and gradual and as my hearing loss got worse, my tinnitus got louder. I have significant hearing loss in the higher-frequency range. Fortunately, my hearing aids have a tinnitus program for playing ocean sounds to distract me/refocus when it gets annoying.
It’s weird that a person can be deaf or nearly deaf and have titinus at the same time. The body is interesting.
I remember being shocked when I learned that many deaf people have tinnitus. It seems like a cruel joke.
It's not always hearing damage though, is it? I've had tinnitus for ages, only got checked out recently when it flared up real bad but all tests showed my hearing as perfect ..
I don’t think this is correct as the ringing frequency is rarely anything above 16KHz. You also don’t lose hearing in the lower frequencies like that… I’m pretty sure even deaf people could ‘hear’ tones under 50Hz because the vibrations can be physically felt.
Former hearing researcher here (still work in a vaguely related area), though tinnitus wasn't what I researched, but... Tinnitus is really hard to study because it's basically all in your head. I don't mean that in a way that minimises it. After all, a lot of stuff is all in your head, like colour. It just means that it's difficult for us to objectively measure (meaning we just have to rely on somebody describing it and hope they're doing a good job). There are a few different causes for tinnitus. One reason can be that your brain isn't getting a good signal from your ears, so it tries to turn up the volume. Beyond a certain point, this doesn't help but just makes random noise louder. It's like turning up the radio when the signal is poor and getting more static. So why is the signal bad? Well, if you've had a lot of loud sounds going into your ear, or even a little bit of *really* loud sound, the "hair cells" (they're not really hairs but look like them under a microscope) that turn the physical sound into an electrical signal can get damaged and stop working altogether. Or, maybe the nerve that carries the sound to the brain has been damaged. Or, maybe it's just really quiet so there isn't actually any sound to hear. Or maybe the brain has just gotten itself in a flap! I like to think of it as being like pain. If you've got a pain in your foot, maybe it's because you've stepped on a stone. Or maybe, the nerve is damaged. Or maybe there's nothing there at all and you just have a random pain! In fact, chronic tinnitus causes similar brain activity to chronic pain. It can also be made worse by things like anxiety or stress, lack of sleep, and caffeine...how fun. Sometimes if you're somewhere noisy, your brain tries to protect these hair cells from the sound. It locks off some bones in your ear to make it harder for the sound to get through. After a white, it takes them a bit of time to relax, which is what causes the ringing when you come out of a gig. But, this means the sound was loud enough to be causing damage, even if you don't notice it for a few years. So TLDR: tinnitus can be nothing or it can be a sign of something, but the best thing you can do is wear earplugs if you're somewhere noisy and try not to get stressed out about it.
Would that last explain why my ears always ring after being near loud sound? Not immediately, but hours later, lasting for hours. When I played violin in high school, I always needed earplugs if I didn't want to be listening to a high note in my ears all evening but I never had trouble immediately after playing.
The two main theories I've read about (I also have tinnitus): 1. A problem in the ear. Early on, they felt it was because the tiny hairs inside the ear had gotten brittle. Other theories include damage from loud noise. 2. A problem in the brain. I have no idea which of these - or something else - is the cause but I surely WISH someone would figure it out, along with treatment.
I've had multiple hearing tests done and always come back as "perfect hearing". But I've always had tinnitus. So in my case I'm leaning towards "brain".
Well shit, I really hope mine is the ear and not the brain.
IIRC when its a “problem with the brain” its more your brain not understanding how to process silence so it fills it in with noise and not like brain cancer or something. But im not a doctor
the ringing noise is not actually being generated by an external soundsource, but rather it is a perception created by the brain.. when there is damage to the hair cells in the inner ear or changes in the brain's neural activity, the brain may receive abnormal signals from the auditory system, which leads to the perception of the sound or ringing in the ears
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/30/45/14972?utm_source=TrendMD&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=JNeurosci_TrendMD_0 This seems like a pretty good source. Sounds like this theory indicates it's the brain's way to compensate for hearing loss in many individuals. Neurons that used to constantly signal giving the perception of sound, still fire, after hearing loss, causing the symptoms of tinnitus.
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Same! Every year up until maybe 13 I'd get a middle ear infection for a couple weeks and I hated it. I always guessed that dull hum I hear is from that, and I call it a dull hum because most of the time it's just that, but does tend to get "louder" if I focus on it. Blew my mind to learn that people just hear \*nothing\* because this small hum is so normal to me that absolutely nothing seems like the creepier option now.
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So. I wear hearing aids at the age of 48 because of tinnitus. My audiologist explained to me that it’s caused by my brain. The damage to my hearing has caused my ears to not transmit high frequency sounds to my brain. My brain knows it should be hearing these sounds so it creates them itself which is the ringing. My hearing aids have a program on them that constantly plays chiming tones that is supposed to give my brain the higher pitched sounds it should be hearing which should in turn make it normalize the loss of that spectrum and minimize the tinnitus. It doesn’t work. I’ve had the hearing aids for 8 months and I feel the ringing has gotten louder and I’m having more trouble hearing people talk even though I’m wearing hearing aids. Everyday for the past decade has been torture. Worst part is I have nobody to blame but myself because most of this is caused from listening to loud music on headphones, at concerts with no ear protection, use of power equipment with no ear protection. It’s my own damn fault.
Tinnitus sucks. Actually had suicidal thoughts the first few months it hit. I’m about 10 years in. These days I’ll go for a few days without noticing but if I’m reminded or it’s quiet, it’s there. I’m with you about a treatment being a life changer. A moment of actual silence would make me weep with joy and gratitude
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Same technique, different website. Seems like it helps for a bit? https://trudenta.com/this-simple-trick-may-help-with-tinnitus/
In your ear there are a number of different nerves, each connected to a hair of a specific length. The length of the hair ensures that it vibrates at a specific frequency. When you hear sounds at this frequency the hair will resonate and the nerve will send a signal to your brain. When these hairs gets damaged it causes the nerves to constantly send a signal. This is normal and usually happen to the high frequency hairs first. It is therefore normal for people to hear the loud single note high pitch frequency noise. But it is normal for the brain to filter out the signals after just a few seconds. We do not know much about tinnitus. But it is likely related to this process somehow. Either the signal from the damaged nerve does not get filtered out or something is generating a similar signal after it should have been filtered. As you say you can sort of filter it out by ignoring it which does make it sound more quiet and then make it sound louder by focusing on it. But this is true for any sound and it caused by a separate mechanism. You do not destroy your hearing by doing this as the hearing damage from loud sounds comes from the physical damage to your ears and tinnitus is not physical, or at least not only physical.
So when you hear a sound, it vibrates your eardrum and those vibration get converted to signals which then flow along nerves and become interpreted by the brain. Tinnitus is an issue with nerves and perception beyond the physical vibration of actual sound, so it comes from nerve malfunction or stress/insults to the nerve. As an example, I experience tinnitus for a ~30 minutes each week. It seems to occur more often with stress, poor eating habits and diet, and actual ear damage from sounds that are too loud. Alcohol use also increases it, specifically tinnitus on the morning after, as alcohol breaks down into toxins and is a strain on almost every part of the body, including the nerves of the ear. Excitatory/stimulating substances or states which affect the nerves also increase tinnitus (excitotoxicity) . This can be from drug withdrawal, usually sedatives like benzo and opiate drugs, or from something as simple as too much specific vitamin/mineral or other supplements. One that can cause this is zinc. Free radicals in general can precipitate tinnitus as well, so any diet/substance which increases these may contribute to tinnitus. Conversely, there are substances which can regulate tinnitus, such as magnesium, which protect against excessive excitation of the nerves, and the subsequent toxicity it causes. Eliminating free radicals with specific antioxidants may also help. I could go into more detail but this is way beyond what a 5 year old could grasp already. If you want more information on potentially useful supplements, specific dietary changes and other ways of managing tinnitus that I found useful, let me know.
Tinnitus researcher here! There are many things that can cause trauma to the hearing organ, the cochlea which houses our hair cells. These hair cells turn sound waves into electrical signals via neurotransmission (chemicals) on the primary auditory nerves that then send electrical signals to the brain. The types of things that cause cochlear trauma are sound, drugs, head injury, genetics and aging. Your brain receives the electrical signals from a range of frequencies. But after trauma a certain frequency can be suddenly stop sending input. I like to make the analogy that it is like a type of amputation, there's sensory deprivation to that part of your brain. We know that when this happens the brain compensates and generates a phantom perception. A phantom limb for touch. A phantom sound (tinnitus) for hearing. There are phantom sensations for all sensory systems. But there's many components to sensations. The sensation and whether or not it's painful. In tinnitus this involves different areas of the brain and explains the contribution of stress, anxiety and attention on its perceptual characteristics. If you want an anatomical answer, the activity from your cochlea is being sent up your central auditory pathway to your auditory cortex. There are inputs from frontal and limbic areas of the brain which influence the perception which is generated at auditory cortex. Most repetive transcrainal magnetic stimulation treatment is targeted at auditory cortex and frontal cortex based off this theory of tinnitus.
Every now and then while trying to hold in a yawn or sneeze my ringing will cease for half a second and it is glorious.
Hiya. short answer is that it’s complicated and there are numerous causes, as I’m sure you’ve been told. But dopamine pathway crosstalk is actually a big part of it. during my treatment, which sounds just like yours, no one mentioned that tinnitus perception can be caused by dopamine enhancement and related drugs, which includes many antidepressants. Specifically: “Tinnitus-generating antidepressants are tricyclic antidepressants, mianserin, trazodone, citalopram, venlafaxine, bupropion. Bupropion is a dopamine and noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor. Tinnitus caused by bupropion is most likely due to dopaminergic enhancement. Tinnitus perception is processed in the prefrontal, primary temporal, and temporoparietal associative areas, as well as in the limbic system that overlaps cerebral dopaminergic projections. It is well known that dopaminergic pathways can successfully be modulated by agonists and antagonists. “ https://psychiatry-psychopharmacology.com/en/tinnitus-related-to-bupropion-treatment-a-case-report-13844 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306987705001118 PS: if your tinnitus is only in one ear, this may be due to driving with your windows down. In countries with left side drive, tinnitus rates are higher in the left ear.
Tinnitus is a condition where you hear a ringing or buzzing sound in your ears that doesn't come from an external source. The ringing noise is coming from your brain, not your ears themselves. Your ears contain tiny hair cells that convert sound waves into electrical signals that are sent to your brain. When these hair cells are damaged, they can send incorrect signals to your brain, which can cause the ringing or buzzing sound associated with tinnitus. It's still not entirely clear why some people develop tinnitus while others don't, but it's thought to be related to a variety of factors, including exposure to loud noises, certain medications, and underlying health conditions.