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 😂
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.
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.
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 😂
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
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.
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 😁