Children of tinnitus

[seanw]

My understanding is that, yes, different fibers in your ears detect different frequencies, which is why some people can become deaf to specific frequencies, and also, I think, provides the mechanism by which children but not oldsters will hear, for instance, the whine of a cathode ray tube. I don't know what the connection to tinnitus is, though.

[Ken Jennings]

But is the squeal you hear the same frequency you will never hear again, as Dr. Moore implies?

[jzerocsk]

According to Dr. W. I. Kipedia who is surely as respected and authoritative as Dr. Moore, this has a kernel of truth to it.

Actually, Dr. Kipedia's statement on this symptom is linked to a believable looking abstract that says there is a clear association between the squeal and the frequency that's been damaged.

[SavageBean]

@Sean and @Ken - I believe what Dr. Moore is implying is at least a scientifically sound argument. Tinnitus is often caused by noise-induced hearing loss (i.e. that bomb going off or that chainsaw or lawnmower or whatever). Interestingly, there are specific cells in one's ear called hair cells that respond to individual pitches. They're organized in a sort of piano-like way, from lowest pitches to highest pitches, and have a 1:1 transmission to the brain. So every pitch has its own circuit going from ear to brain. When a cell that recognizes, say, a concert C dies, you can't hear that pitch anymore, and the theory goes that as the connection is lost between the dying cell in your ear and the one that routes the encoded information into your brain, the routing cell perceives that pitch. So, yeah, in this one specific case, I'm pretty sure the science is sound.

[Turkey]

I'd always been told that the ringing sound comes from the little sound-detecting hairs/follicles/whatever inside your ear laying down and touching the inner ear when normally they stand upright (and wave back and forth with the sound waves). But I may have gotten that from an old Disney Jiminy Cricket cartoon, so don't quote me on that.

On checking the infallible Internets, most medical pages talk about tinnitus in general, plus a section about tinnitus connected with hearing loss. This would suggest that not all forms of ringing in the ears goes hand-in-hand with losing your hearing in any way (including different pitches).

[vinull]

I've been living with tinnitus for about 5 years now, the result of radiation and surgery to fight cancer. I'm no doctor, but I can tell you for many of us, it does not fade away. I'm also deaf in the same ear, and I never knew (or wanted to know) that you can be both deaf and have tinnitus. Maybe when Beethoven conducted he did hear a song, just not the same one we did.

Everything I've read and been told over the years has said that tinnitus is not something that can be observed or measured. There is no method of diagnosing tinnitus that isn't asking the patient "do you have a ringing in your ears". I don't think there is anything that has stated the cause either.

Living with it, you learn to ignore it. You actually teach yourself to not notice the frequency it's on. Common suggestions for dealing with bad tinnitus are basically calming and relaxing techniques so you can get into a zen state that let's you "program" the mind to ignore it. As you can imagine, this is different for everyone. Some need a quite room and others like me do better with a small about of noise going on like in an office.

Tinnitus also isn't always a constant pitch. Mine will move to match the white noise in a room, or other similar frequency. Running tap water in the kitchen I often stop hearing the sound of the faucet, as my tinnitus matches the pitch after a moment or two. I notice when I stop the tap that I wasn't hearing it because the tinnitus will then shift to something else I do hear.

Once, my PC was overheating so I had it on my desk, right next to my deaf / tinnitus ear. At some point, the case fan started squealing, but I never heard it. It got so bad my brother came in from another room shouting "How do you not hear that!?" I guess it was driving him mad.

I've also done serious damage to my brake rotors on my truck, since I never hear the high pitch squeal they make to indicate stopping is begin done by metal on metal. When they took the rotors off, it looked like a 45 RPM vinyl record.

So, it may be true that fibers in the ear are tuned to frequencies, but I doubt this has nothing to do with tinnitus.

[SavageBean]

I should say that the mechanics of tinnitus being caused by noise-induced hearing loss referenced in the movie is probably TOTALLY different from chronic tinnitus, whose physiological causes are still unknown, I think.

[j]

As someone who has a (thankfully minor) case of chronic tinnitus, I'm not sure if I buy this theory: I often hear sounds that my wife doesn't, and the reverse is rarely if ever true.

The idea that mankind will no longer be able to procreate in 16 years, however, is completely scientifically sound.

[skullturfq]

The idea that mankind will no longer be able to procreate in 16 years, however, is completely scientifically sound.

My brother has a one-year-old daughter so that news may come as a relief to him.

[Orange]

More recent research expands the understanding of tinnitus by likening it to phantom limb pain. It's not coming from a damn thing inside the ears—it's in the brain, where there's a perception that a sound is being heard even when it isn't present. The brain generates the fake sound (which is all too real to the person whose brain is involved).

Andrew Breitbart (whom I deplore except for this post) wrote about a new tinnitus treatment approach (http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id ... _article=1) that's beginning clinical trials in Europe: vagus nerve stimulation in combination with high-frequency sound to retrain the brain to quit wigging out. Vagus nerve stimulation is also used in people with epilepsy or depression.

As a sometime tinnitus sufferer and the niece of someone with horrible, life-altering tinnitus, it would be great to see a management approach that actually eliminates tinnitus rather than just improving one's tolerance for it.

[lhopitalified]

Agree with all of the above -- different sensor cells in the ear are tuned to different frequencies and can die off, leaving you unable to hear specific ranges. Whether you perceive the frequency in question as the cell dies due to trauma is a little bit iffier, because perception is in the brain and sensation is in the sensor (which is why you can have tinnitus without any apparent physical cause).

It'd be somewhat difficult to test, because standard practices wouldn't allow you to damage someone's hearing on purpose to see if the tinnitus matched frequency to the later defect, though I suppose it could be done with brain recordings in macaques, if you were able to map out the auditory regions of the brain in sufficient resolution.

[davidbod]

It's well-known that old TV sound engineers have a 'dip' in their aural response graph that co-incides with the stand blank tone they use as the tuning refence.

[holmes4]

I also have had tinnitus for about six years now, but for me, it was the "sudden onset" type. I went to bed one night hearing fine and woke up the next morning deaf in one ear and with a ringing. Quick attention and treatment by my doctor with steroids brought most of the hearing back within a few weeks, but the ringing is constant and my frequency response in that ear is uneven. There is no accepted cause for this variant, but the most popular theory is a virus that attacks the nerve cells in the ear. While I can hear reasonably well in that ear, I can have trouble picking out voices in noisy environments and loud, shrill tones are painful.

It would not astonish me at all if there was some sort of specialization going on, but not to an exact frequency, I'm sure.

The doctors I consulted told me that many people who get hit by this wait too long to get treatment, or get misdiagnosed and sent home with decongestants or ear wax removal kits. In these cases, the hearing loss is permanent. One specialist told me that I "took the prize" in getting immediate treatment and he was certain it made all the difference.

[Robert K S]

One helpful way to think of tinnitus is as the aural version of phantom limb. When the brain is starved of a sensory input it is used to processing--whether signals corresponding to the proprioception of limbs or, as here, signals corresponding to certain hearing frequencies no longer available because of the death of cochlear hair cells--the brain tries to reorganize to seek a new input for all the processing "hardware" that it has always devoted to that signal. Unfortunately, that new input signal it finds doesn't correspond to a real, useful signal, like the original signal so what results is invariably unusual and unpleasant. Sometimes the brain adapts to attenuate the "noise" it's receiving ("noise" in the electrical engineering sense of nonsignal energy, which is coincidentally, in the case of hearing loss, perceived as a sonic noise), and the unpleasant ringing dies down. In other cases, it does not, and the tinnitus persists for life. This is why it's so dangerous to go to even one loud rock concert--you may end up with a depression-inducing lifelong neural injury.

Dr. Moore's diagnosis is spot-on, except in the characterization of the ringing as a kind of "swan song". Those hair cells are dead, and not coming back. The ringing isn't coming from those cells, but from other sources in the brain, which neurons are trying to "mine" for information through neural reorganization. (What made you think it was BS, Ken?)

[Sequin]

A BBC article:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12698862

[Cannon]

I am going to discuss the matter with my wife - an audiologist - and provide a definitive answer in relative short order. BTW, there's no such thing as "selective hearing"in my house.

Also, I have tinnitus, caused by electrical shock, the result of which was high frequency hearing loss in the left ear.

[Cannon]

According to my wife, first, they are "hair cells" not "nerve cells." There are series of hair cells that are responsible for your hearing certain frequencies. Tinnitus is not a "swan song" but is evidence of damage to hair cells. You can have hearing loss and no tinnitus and vice versa.

It would be false to say that when tinnitus ceases - the hair cell has then died and you can no longer hear in a particular frequency.


Additionally, you can be completely deaf and have tinnitus.

[allens-rea]

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