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The Organ of the Universe: On Living with Tinnitus

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Re: The Organ of the Universe: On Living with Tinnitus

#71

Post by lovemenot »

Robelius wrote: post #47
guhcampos wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mine sounds exactly the same! I usually describe it as the sound of "brightness" and it does feel like something coming from inside my head, instead of from the outside word. As many people, I cope with mine by just ignoring it, most of the time. Sleeping has been hard though, since I can remember. Today I resort to some kind of color noise, such as a fan, air conditioner, or white noise apps (brown noise works best)…

About 4 years ago I was listening to a podcast. One host was explaining to the other that he had tinnitus, and what that meant. I still remember how shocked I was when I heard the tinnitus host was in the minority of the population. Never knew what tinnitus was, but had assumed everyone heard a low buzzing noise. I always thought a low buzzing noise was what silence meant.

You might have been right all along.

As far as I know, many people who don't have tinnitus are able to experience such auditory hallucinations in a sensory deprivation tank or similar.

If that assumption is right then the difference between tinnitus sufferers and others is of degree: the level of background sensory input at which consciousness of such hallucinations might kick-in.

Hence, tinnitus or not, lower auditory input tends to lead to greater likelihood of auditory hallucination.

Re: The Organ of the Universe: On Living with Tinnitus

#72

Post by biggieshellz »

osrec wrote: post #42

I have a theory that everyone experiences some form of tinnitus, but only some are bothered by it. It's like when you start thinking too deeply about how your intangible mind controls your body, it can be rather suffocating, as there is no escape from the unanswered sense of emptiness that thought can generate. Similarly with tinnitus, once you start focusing on it too much, it feels like like something you can't esc…

That's how Tinnitus Retraining Therapy works, but there's also a physical component that makes it more likely. Researchers have hypothesized that if you have sharp notches in your hearing thresholds at certain frequencies, your brain is more likely to try to fill in with tinnitus than if you had a flatter loss across the spectrum. As the article states, this is still an active research area -- we don't really have a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms that create tinnitus yet.

Re: The Organ of the Universe: On Living with Tinnitus

#73

Post by biggieshellz »

davidzweig wrote: post #57
coldcode wrote: post #11

I had it for a couple months earlier this year and it was terribly annoying. My ENT took all sorts of images (CAT, MRI) and in the end just gave me some strong antibiotics in the ear. After a few days I was like, what is wrong, and realized it was gone. Of course there are many reasons but in my case it was some oddball bacterium.

Could you tell us a bit more? How did the doctor establish that bacteria was the problem? I started having problems after having something like a flu, with thick yellow stuff coming out of my eyes. The ear doctor I saw didn't have many ideas.

If the ear doctor you saw couldn't diagnose the problem, you might want to look for an otologist or neurotologist. It's a more specialized version of an ENT that deals with problems of the inner ear.

Re: The Organ of the Universe: On Living with Tinnitus

#74

Post by blunte »

davidzweig wrote: post #55
blunte wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm describing is very location dependent, just as sound waves will be louder depending on your proximity to their half or full wavelength. I don't doubt there can be internal explanations for some sounds, but what I experience is often dependent on location within a few feet, with some spots being much louder than others. Also, I'm not always the only person who hears it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum

I get that a bit late at night, I think from the noise of the fridge compressor motor that reverberates against the wall. If I put in an earplug it stops.

For low frequency sounds, earplugs make it worse - they reduce higher frequency sounds much much more than they reduce the vlf sounds. The result is a more acute awareness of the annoying low freq sound.

But hey, if it works for you, great!

Re: The Organ of the Universe: On Living with Tinnitus

#75

Post by burnte »

didgeoridoo wrote: post #35
jpindar wrote: post #33

My tinnitus is usually not bad enough to be bothersome, but when it gets painful, I listen to https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/neuromodulationTonesGenera... That's not just noise, it does... something... that provides instant relief. That site also has a great variety of background sounds which you can adjust and combine in myriad ways.

Holy. Crap. I just listened to that for 5 minutes and my tinnitus (which was pretty bad today) just vaporized. I feel like my jaw has relaxed for the first time in weeks. How did I not know about this??

After reading your comment, I loaded that up and played it for several minutes. I've never heard ACTUAL silence before. I have tinnitus from a couple of bad concussions when I was a kid, and I've always had at least a quiet tone in my ear. This is weird!

Re: The Organ of the Universe: On Living with Tinnitus

#76

Post by dvtv75 »

jpindar wrote: post #33

My tinnitus is usually not bad enough to be bothersome, but when it gets painful, I listen to https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/neuromodulationTonesGenera... That's not just noise, it does... something... that provides instant relief. That site also has a great variety of background sounds which you can adjust and combine in myriad ways.

Thanks! I found this site a year or so back, but lost it in a browser crash (of sorts). Haven't been able to find it until now, so you're a (figurative) life saver!

Re: The Organ of the Universe: On Living with Tinnitus

#77

Post by dvtv75 »

zaarn wrote: post #66
arkh wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add visual snow and you don't even experience darkness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_snow

This article somewhat blew my mind. I always thought everyone sees this visual noise and kinda assumed it's like a digital camera in the dark...

I didn't even realize it was abnormal until now (although I note there's some debate as to whether it is or not). My mother has this, too, and wears blue tinted lenses to filter it out.

Re: The Organ of the Universe: On Living with Tinnitus

#78

Post by dvtv75 »

keitmo wrote: post #21

I developed tinnitus in 2009, a neurological "gift" from a case of swine flu. (The other gift was chronic paroxysmal hemicrania, a nightmarish migraine-like condition that threatened to destroy my life until I got it under control with medication.) The tinnitus was exacerbated a few years later after a freak accident while inflating a mountain bike tire. The tire exploded off the rim, more-or-less directly into my ri…

Mine was a "gift" from my mother's physically abusive boyfriend, who would haul me around by my ears when I was five or six. I have three high pitched tones in my right ear, two in my left.

If you're familiar with the high pitched squeal of a CRT television, even the lowest of my tones is far, far higher pitched than that. Now that I'm in my 40s, it's probably well outside my actual hearing range.

Re: The Organ of the Universe: On Living with Tinnitus

#79

Post by coldcode »

davidzweig wrote: post #57
coldcode wrote: post #11

I had it for a couple months earlier this year and it was terribly annoying. My ENT took all sorts of images (CAT, MRI) and in the end just gave me some strong antibiotics in the ear. After a few days I was like, what is wrong, and realized it was gone. Of course there are many reasons but in my case it was some oddball bacterium.

Could you tell us a bit more? How did the doctor establish that bacteria was the problem? I started having problems after having something like a flu, with thick yellow stuff coming out of my eyes. The ear doctor I saw didn't have many ideas.

The ENT didn't really know what the issue was for sure, the antibiotics were more of a guess from what I could tell. Since it worked it was a good one.

Re: The Organ of the Universe: On Living with Tinnitus

#80

Post by GuardianCaveman »

I have had tinnitus and it was pretty terrible the first year but I got used to it almost completely. Then I woke up one day with a new thing called diplacusis where I hear a tone on top of sound for certain frequencies. So my wife says hi how are you and I hear that plus a tone for each word. It sounds kind of like the radios in the xwings in Star Wars. I’ve been adjusting for 3 months but it’s very hard to habituate. Fortunately it has softened in that time. But it seems to be extremely rare associated with a sudden dip in one of the hearing ranges where the rest of hearing is mostly normal. Oh well...
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