Dan Polley

I have tinnitus, and whenever I want to, I can hear that beautiful symphony of that pure tone.

Because the brain doesn't have direct contact with the physical world, everything that we perceive as consciousness is constructed from the activity of the brain.

People with really severe tinnitus have like a whole brain problem.

Their tinnitus has expanded and it's incorporated like other brain networks.

And whatever hyperactivity in my auditory pathway that's causing me to perceive a sound that isn't there, it hasn't changed the ability of my executive control to concentrate, or it hasn't reprogrammed my limbic system to find all sounds horribly aversive and make me depressed.

Yeah.

It isn't actually that their tinnitus is louder.

That hyperactivity spilled over and recruited other brain systems that have nothing to do with hearing per se, but with your ability to concentrate, to sleep, to like regulate mood and emotion.

They have a more widespread network of dysregulation in their brain than I do.

They can take you from like, I have tinnitus disorder, I'm not sleeping, I'm depressed, I'm socially withdrawn.

And they can turn you into somebody like me, who like, it's like a little bit annoying.

But if you can take the one in 10 who's severely tinnitus,

debilitated by their genus and turn them into like the other nine, I'd still take that as something useful.