I’ve always learned it comes from damaged hair cells inside the ear, how could it be anything but physical? Very surprised it can be picked up with a microphone in an anechoic chamber though
I have a kind of tinnitus that comes and goes based on how stressed out the tendons in my neck and jaw are, on one side, after a pretty serious physical injury.
I can basically massage away my tinnitus a good deal of the time, its only on the side that got fucked up.
Beyond that, I actually have exceptionally good hearing (for my age at least), and I often hear things other people don’t even notice, yay autism!
Poorly shielded inductors in switch mode PSUs/old CRTs for me (Very common in older devices, low current causes the switching frequency to drop into the audible range.)
You can build your own tinnitus inducer with a cheapo 100kHz buck ic, put an air coil inductor on it, and then decrease the current until failure.
I was with you until: “[…] but it can also be heard by the examiner (eg, by placing a stethoscope over the patient’s external auditory canal).” and now I’m even more confused
The sound? Well, ultimately sounds are just those hairs and your cochlea and eardrum and all that getting hit by vibrations in the air and sending signals to your brain which get interpreted; damage the equipment so it sends signals even when there’s no vibrations in the air hitting it, and you have your non-physical sound. Same way phantom limb syndrome works.
However what if the damage doesn’t cause signals in the absence of sound? What if tinnitus is actually the cochlea itself (or something/s in the apparatus anyway) physically vibrating and producing that whining sound? Like a mosquito’s wings beating.
It seems like it could be some kind of feedback loop where the false signalling is actually inducing a physical response that can be recorded under ideal conditions. At the end of the day, the eardrum is an audio transducer, and every other such device we know of can make “fake noise” by being pushed into an unstable state.
If you close your eyes tightly you can induce the perception of color. If you stand in a doorway and lift your arms to the side so that the backs of your hands are pressing against the inside of the door frame, keep pressing for 60 seconds, then step out of the doorway and relax your arms: it’ll feel like your arms are floating.
The body’s systems are complex and part of reliably filtering signal from noise in such systems is establishing a baseline while in a steady state. Our brains are pretty good at filtering out noise but the pressures or degradations which lead to tinnitus seem to trick the brain into accepting some noise as signal.
Maybe it’s like the way microphones and speakers are basically the same hardware, with the cells surrounding the hair in your ear canal vibrating those hairs “out” at high frequency for some reason.
I’ve always learned it comes from damaged hair cells inside the ear, how could it be anything but physical? Very surprised it can be picked up with a microphone in an anechoic chamber though
I have a kind of tinnitus that comes and goes based on how stressed out the tendons in my neck and jaw are, on one side, after a pretty serious physical injury.
I can basically massage away my tinnitus a good deal of the time, its only on the side that got fucked up.
Beyond that, I actually have exceptionally good hearing (for my age at least), and I often hear things other people don’t even notice, yay autism!
Poorly shielded electronic devices go
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRTEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!Poorly shielded inductors in switch mode PSUs/old CRTs for me (Very common in older devices, low current causes the switching frequency to drop into the audible range.)
You can build your own tinnitus inducer with a cheapo 100kHz buck ic, put an air coil inductor on it, and then decrease the current until failure.
It’s called objective tinnitus. Tinnitus can have different causes, the damaged hair cells one is the most common.
I was with you until: “[…] but it can also be heard by the examiner (eg, by placing a stethoscope over the patient’s external auditory canal).” and now I’m even more confused
The sound? Well, ultimately sounds are just those hairs and your cochlea and eardrum and all that getting hit by vibrations in the air and sending signals to your brain which get interpreted; damage the equipment so it sends signals even when there’s no vibrations in the air hitting it, and you have your non-physical sound. Same way phantom limb syndrome works.
However what if the damage doesn’t cause signals in the absence of sound? What if tinnitus is actually the cochlea itself (or something/s in the apparatus anyway) physically vibrating and producing that whining sound? Like a mosquito’s wings beating.
It seems like it could be some kind of feedback loop where the false signalling is actually inducing a physical response that can be recorded under ideal conditions. At the end of the day, the eardrum is an audio transducer, and every other such device we know of can make “fake noise” by being pushed into an unstable state.
Makes sense, and I’ve also read it’s very hard to study as well. Different causes with the same perceived sound sounds like a diagnostic nightmare
Why would a damaged hair cell make noise?
If you close your eyes tightly you can induce the perception of color. If you stand in a doorway and lift your arms to the side so that the backs of your hands are pressing against the inside of the door frame, keep pressing for 60 seconds, then step out of the doorway and relax your arms: it’ll feel like your arms are floating.
The body’s systems are complex and part of reliably filtering signal from noise in such systems is establishing a baseline while in a steady state. Our brains are pretty good at filtering out noise but the pressures or degradations which lead to tinnitus seem to trick the brain into accepting some noise as signal.
If you’re looking for a deep dive then the following paper does an excellent job of outling what we know and what our best guesses are so far: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306987724002718
It’s jargon-laden but nothing someone armed with a dictionary can’t handle. 🙂
Right, but I’m not talking about perceiving noise, I’m talking about creating noise.
Maybe it’s like the way microphones and speakers are basically the same hardware, with the cells surrounding the hair in your ear canal vibrating those hairs “out” at high frequency for some reason.
Because they’re broken
They’re screaming
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Somebody much smarter than me will be able provide answers!