I thought otoacoustic emissions were known for a while, but I guess confirming that tinnitus is (or can be) an OAE might be promising for treatment.
This was already known. Some forms of tinnitus are ‘real’
i had decent pitch before my tinnitus, but it rings at a constant e8. now i have perfect pitch.
So its a real sound? Noise cancelling implants then?
Here is an interview with her. She had it bad:
“I do have a chronic health condition, which made it difficult to pinpoint if it was that that was suddenly getting worse, or whether it was [the damage to the ear] that was causing neurological changes, but I literally couldn’t walk straight; I was having what looked like strokes where I would collapse.” A violinist, she was told by doctors to give up playing. When the COVID pandemic arrived a few months in, she was forced to shield because of ultimately false suspicions that she had MS. “I got really frustrated,” De La Mata says. “I wasn’t getting any of the answers I wanted. It was, ‘Your hearing is fine, you’re young, you’re healthy,’ and it’s like, well clearly I’m not if I can’t walk and people are feeding me.”
https://thequietus.com/interviews/lola-de-la-mata-oceans-on-azimuth-tinnitus-interview/
“you’re young, you’re healthy”, and its like, well clearly I’m not if I can’t walk and people are feeding me.
Yup, sounds like a doctor alright
I’ve had my own fair share of doctors not believing my struggles. Sometimes even directly getting in the way of medical help. And yes, it’s incredibly unhelpful.
I spent 20 years trying to find a rheumatologist who would take my positive lupus test results, symptoms, extensive family history, and potential comorbidities seriously and give me a diagnosis and treatment. Nobody would listen until I was 23 because I was “too young.” After 23, they started accusing me of just wanting medical marijuana.
At 27 I finally found a doctor that would take me seriously. We spent 2 hours going over the 15 years of medical records of mine that are accessible digitally, as well as some physical records from before that that my mother kept in a safe. The doctor ordered an absurd amount of tests and gave me a diagnosis when they all came back indicating that I, indeed, have lupus. She saw the same results in all of my records, too. I’ve tested positive and have had all of the other indicators my entire life. Like I am a textbook case of Systemic Lupus Erythematous that attacks the joints and connective tissue.
She started me on treatment and for the first time in my life, I’m not ruled by my pain and fatigue. I actually have a life now. I have started doing things that I’ve always dreamed of doing because now I can. I’m not chained to my bed anymore.
All of the doctors that refused to treat me despite positive test results and symptoms because I was “too young” or “just wanting marijuana” can rot in Hell. “Do not harm” my ass. I spent twenty years suffering, with multiple pediatricians and general practitioners sending me to every rheumatologist they knew of to try to get treatment for what they, non-specialists, believe I suffer from.
I drive two and a half hours one way every 6 months to see my rheumatologist and it’s worth it because she gave me my life. I’d say she gave my life back to me, but I never had one to begin with. I’m actually living now. 20 years too late if you ask me, but better late than never.
To be fair, did she even try yoga?
A violinist, she was told by doctors to give up playing.
i’ve had doctors recommend similar. i’ve basically learned MDs gave up all their dreams and they expect us to do so as well
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
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 DC power supply inside your ears is only medium quality and so your preamp is prone to picking up coil whine.
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!
About 2/3 of my family (including me) have the same thing, some kind of hereditary issue with the nerve that runs from the jaw up behind the ear. Accompanied by most of us also having jaws that don’t quite fit in their sockets properly and tend to pop and crunch from time to time.
Poorly shielded electronic devices go
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRTEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!Let’s also not forget the dreaded ‘… what do you mean I need to replace the batteries in my smoke detector?’
Though, I don’t think you have to be autistic for that to be extremely annoying, lol.
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.
how could it be anything but physical?
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.
Yeah, I always thought it was just the brain filling in the blanks by lack of data as in no data meaning “constant sound” or something.
If you can actually hear the tinnitus it’s very promising for curing it, if it’s a spasm in a micromuscle of the ear trying to free the hair from mucus there could potentially be a way to have something slow release a muscle relaxant in the ear to remove it as an example.
Right, I thought the same! Like a weight scale that got pushed on too hard and can’t be tared back to 0, so it always reads some weight even with nothing on it. My neck is still stiff from the double-take i did when I saw this 😂
That’s still a physical sound even if the source is internal or at the sensor.
“Non-physical sound” would necessarily be errant nerve signaling or hallucination, something on the brain side of the sensor.
Yes. I’m not sure what you’re disagreeing with? The discovery was that it is possible to record tinnitus from someone’s ear when we thought it was a neurological phenomenon. So tinnitus does actually produce a physical sound, even in cases that don’t have a known physical cause like muscular tinnitus (https://dizziness-and-balance.com/disorders/hearing/tinnitus/ME.html). I’m just theorising what could be causing the physical sound in such cases.
edit: oh, I see, this is in context of the question I was replying to. “Physical sound” doesn’t mean “it was perceived by something physical” it means it’s actual vibrations in the air. We thought tinnitus was just abnormal brain activity, not a physical sound; turns out that is at least partially wrong.
Yeah you caught it in the edit 😁
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.
What is the mechanism for the ‘physical response’? Your proposition assumes that the eardrum or the cochlea have some kinda muscle that would vibrate them, which makes no sense and hasn’t ever been a part of the ear anatomy.
Any organic motion detector is just a series of mechanical, chemical and electrical connections which translate the motion to nerve impulses. All these things can work backwards, although likely with much less efficiency. It’s a reasonable theory that there’s a path creating these sounds from tinnitus even if the original source is the brain nerve signals. Of course there’s of other conflicting theories too. But it’s hard to experiment to figure it out as we can’t cut apart a functioning system to see what parts are doing what - well we probably could, but the ethics board might have a problem with that.
Nobody said it would have to be the cochlea or the eardrum specifically. Involuntary muscle contractions of the tensor tympani and stapedius muscles which are both connected to the ossicular chain of “hearing bones” inside your ear, for example, can generate audible sounds through involuntary contractions that change the tension of the eardrum. When processed by the auditory system, these contractions can be experienced as tinnitus. This is known as muscular tinnitus (https://dizziness-and-balance.com/disorders/hearing/tinnitus/ME.html). So what I’m saying is, maybe there are other physical mechanisms of action that we didn’t even think to look for until the physical sound was recorded from a case that was expected to be entirely neurological.
I’m not a medical professional, I just did some reading.
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?
The hair cell’s whole job is to send neuronal signal when there’s vibration at its specific frequency. It’s entirely conceivable that a cell would get stuck in the ‘send signal’ mode when damaged, just as it can go the other way and send no signal ever anymore.
Right, which would make the owner of the hair percieve a sound that isn’t happening. The novel part is other people being able to hear it too.
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.
Ah. My bad. That’s kind of covered indirectly within the third reference paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959438808000871) and more-so in this paper: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2724262
Part of the process for our hearing involves otoacoustic emission (wikipedia), i.e., creating sound. My arm-chair understanding is that we think this part of the process misbehaving is a main contributor for objective tinnitus and why we can record it under the right circumstances.
tl;dr: ear too loud.
I’m in the same spot. Obviously I believe it happens if I’m reading it from a credible source, but the idea that a hair makes sound that other people can record and hear doesn’t make sense. How does it do that??
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!
Mawp. Mawp. Mawp.
I got rid of my handheld game after I noticed my thumb was starting to twitch while I was at rest.
Apparently, the same thing can happen with ears.
This is quite the opposite of what the image macro says
According to the macro, the ear is actually producing sounds. Sounds are vibrations. Apparently, the ear continues to vibrate without stimulation, the same way my thumb kept moving even if there was no game.
How is it ‘the opposite?’
edit = nontechnical article. https://guildofscientifictroubadours.com/2024/06/09/recording-tinnitus-as-it-happens-for-art-and-science/
Oh, I think I would go insane if I constantly had to hear something. It already weirds me out that people hear things that aren’t actually there and this is a thing that actually is.
It’s always there, but that doesn’t mean one constantly hears it. I’m listening to music a lot, so then I don’t hear it. When I skateboard or do any other sports I don’t hear it, et cetera. Only when it’s quiet I sometimes become aware of it, but because of habituation I usually unconsciously ignore it just as quickly. It does happen that sometimes in bed I keep focusing on it to the point it annoys me, but fortunately that’s rare. Not being able to experience absolute silence in a forest anymore disappoints me though; c’est la vie.
That being said, I’m probably in the camp of people whose condition is mild. It must indeed be horrible for people whose tinnitus overpowers all other sounds.
Mine doesn’t sound quite like that, but it did get a little better for a while after listening to that.
Holy shit mine too! Mines much higher pitch but it was also briefly relieved. Ima keep that video in my pocket…
I wonder if there’s a way to tune that to match and negate an individual’s sound waves…
Iirc white noise supposedly helps with tinnitus. If I’m not misremembering something.
My tinnitus is at the very upper frequency range of my ability to hear, right around 13,000 Hz (I’m 60). Fortunately, I don’t notice it except in a quiet room.
extremely dumb question, but would a very loud 13kHz sound kill the cochlear cells that detect that specific frequency?
Tinnitus is typically induced by exposure to loud noise in the first place, so your proposal could as well make it worse.
what if we make it even louder!!!
now we’re onto something. shoot that tinnitus dead with high frequency sound lasers
Nuke the tinnitus lol
A few rock concerts should take care of that, then.
Makes it worse from my experience. Tends to deaden everything but the squeal
This is the one thing I don’t like about some doctors and scientists: they think they know everything, and in doing so they become lazy and dismissive (or they only care about money and fame). They should always be curious, and always seek to find the next truth, no matter what the general consensus is in the community. Good on De La Mata for challenging the status quo.
This is literally an example of a scientist being curious about something they don’t know and setting up an extremely far fetched experiment.
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What the fuck are you talking about?
Relax, this is a warning.
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some doctors and scientists
The person you are replying to very clearly did not mean all doctors and scientists.
Which is a weird thing to bring up when the topic is scientists who were curious and solved a problem.
OK, not like I brought it up. Go be aggressive somewhere else.
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I took his comment to mean the people who accepted that tinnitus was not physical.
Rarely, the sound may be heard by someone other than the patient by using a stethoscope, in which case it is known as “objective tinnitus”. Occasionally, spontaneous otoacoustic emissions, sounds produced normally by the inner ear, may result in tinnitus.
It’s not ‘physical’ in most cases. Or rather, it’s not acoustic but electric instead.
It’s the same logic and immigrants are lazy and stealing all the benefits of society.
That logic is: someone invented a stereotype and people ran with it instead of being curious and doing science
that’s a good philosophy in general. but I’m practice, it’s hard.
for every million “that can’t be” theories only a handful pan out. doing every “stupid” experiment is practically impossible.
Fucking voodoo shit, get the fuck out of here with that.
I thought that was my brain sound
Brain coil whine
Ground loop feedback
Buddhist monks call this the sound of silence
As do, funnily enough, Simon and Garfunkel
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I meditate to high pitched ringing sound, tunes out thoughts.
I think the song is about emotional connection and not listening to each other?
Just another example of doctors not taking women seriously at first sadly. But at least she was vindicated.
I agree that that is a big problem in medicine, but how is this post an example of that? As far as I’m reading no-one was dismissing her claim of having tinnitus. They were just very surprised that it can apparently manifest as a physical sound, which was unexpected by both her and the scientists.
You’re right. I just got frustrated and commented without evidence.
I mean that’s fair. It is a frustrating subject after all
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The same could affect mens ears. As far as I’m aware there is a higher rate of tinnitus in men due to work related injuries. I’m sure they were not believed.
Pretty sure this isn’t the first time in history someone had this problem.
No, but women are MUCH more likely to have their symptoms dismissed as psychosomatic compared to men. Odds are good if you’re a woman that at least once in your life you will have to justify and defend your right to get proper treatment for a medical issue to a medical practitioner.
I have suffered from tinnitus my entire life (swimmers ear) and never received anything beyond ‘That sucks, good luck!’. I’m a man.
What you’re saying is a real thing that happens, it is in no way relevant to this conversation.
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